Starfield Review

What's out there?

And so we're finally here. After seven years of development and >snicker< 25 years in the works, the legendary 3rd franchise in the Bethesda stable of properties has been born. The legendary 'Space Game' which was advertised to take the familiar gameplay of a BGS game and expand it into a giant universe full of- frankly more content than you can feasibly expect any development team to create. 1000 planets, dozens of populated outposts, a handful of questlines- this really did seem like the Bethesda game to beat all Bethesda games. In fact, I'd say in scale alone Starfield has broken the seal on what we can expect out of the premier Western RPG developer to such a point that the setting of The Elder Scrolls Six has no choice. It has to cover the full continent of Tamriel now. Anything else would be looked back on as a regression from a company that is too big to take small chances now. But has the size and scale of Bethesda's newest game paid off for them in the long run? Is Starfield the game of gamer's dreams? 

When I first heard of Starfield I, like many out there, was entirely non-plussed. A space game that has no interest in the fun aspects of the Sci-Fantasy space operatic genre? No space empires, no Alien races, none of that good stuff which makes techie super futures so cool to envision? Just a stuffy Sci-Fiction with a focus on, what- the dangers of space flight? Oh gee- I just love the idea of a video game wherein everytime I try to launch off my home planet the ship just bursts into flames! Sign me the heck up! What I guess I really wanted was for Bethesda to pick up the slack from Bioware ever since that team guided the Mass Effect brand, along with themselves, clean off of a cliff- but after the presentation from earlier this year I came to realise that they had their ideas cooking and were just vying for that chance to introduce a more accessible side to Science Fiction to the world.

Starfield is based on a largely tangible vision of Space Travel and interstellar life set somewhere between the glitzy sterile-tiled idealism of Star Trek and the clunky industrialised trucker-in-space vibe of Alien. NASA-Punk- Bethesda coined it- leaning off the basic structure of modern day NASA-led space exploration design, from structural ship Habs, full environment space suits and all those terrifying rivets and bolts that the Star Wars universe was so deftly afraid of until the release of Andor. The Punk comes in with the sleek filter applied over these designs in order to allow for them to look cool and dangerous. Tradtional space ship shapes that point into a straightened arrow head and blast off sharp-pointed twin-engine boosters, modular and metal weapons carrying both holographic sights and hard angle design features lending to the familiar mixed with the perception of a violent machine- and layered, sculpted space suits that allow for more personality and individualism then you'd ever see lining the halls of a NASA museum. It's a design philosophy that largely successfully marries robust believability with eccentric futurism, and I happen to think it looks great.

It's a philosophy that expands beyond the visual design and into the fundamental heart of much of what Starfield has to offer. Sure, much of the universe features inhospitable planets which demand very systematic and formulaic techie habitats to be constructed to live in- but you'll also find settlements like that of Neon, a pleasure city built on a distant fishery rig on an Ocean Moon and slathered in all the Cyberpunk-style plasma advertising, drug filled streets and gang-ridden slums you'd expect from a dystopian novel. (Us dystopian novel writers do tend to tread on each other's shoes in that regard) What results is a game that feels different from Fallout in a fundamental design manner, which was perhaps the biggest question mark considering their arguably similar genres, but familiar enough to the style of Bethesda to retain their quality artistic flairs. In fact, some might even go so far as to call this Fallout unchained from a design perspective, simply for how Bethesda manage to create a functioning society were Fallout 4 and even 3 largely struggled.

Unfortunately I think it's that very same staunch marriage to the 'function over form' style of 'NASA Punk' which has tied Starfield to what might possibly be the worst UI and inventory menu that I think a Bethesda game has ever suffered from. And that's saying something, Bethesda is famous for them. The inventory UI in Starfield feels like trying to navigate the system menu of your PC before the OS kicks in. It's barren, unintuitive and honestly just plain and ugly to go through. Most of the time it's a hassle trying to remember which Inventory you're currently in, you, your ships or the container you've been trying to loot for the past half hour. Navigating space's menu is similarly uninspired in all little ways that you think anyone would pick up after a couple hours of play. For example: you'll visit Jemison quite often, it's practically the centre of the galaxy, but everytime you select to view it, you have to twist the globe around in order to land on the only point worth visiting- New Atlantis. Why not default the position of the planet to be on the single point worth visiting when I click on it? Why waste those few seconds of my time every click? It's these little annoyances that build up. 

And menus are going to be something you sit through quite often given Starfield's unique approach to space travel. We already knew that taking off from a planet kicks off a cutscene, there's no seamless landing on planets. What we had to find out was the fact that the art of travelling space is largely handled entirely through menus. You can fly about, sure, but only in the immediate space around a planet. There's no 'cruising speed' such as you might find in Elite Dangerous, that allows you to pop around the solar system, you can't fly around a planet to get a feel for it's size. You can't fly into the sun to off yourself in spectacular fashion. There's so much about space travel that you can't do, which makes it a hard system to get to love. Even with my many hours invested into the game I can't say I love it, just that I tolerate it- which isn't really what you want to be feeling for one of the core conceits of the game concept.

The excuse for this segregation has been to accommodate for the Creation Engine 2's limitations when it comes to world generation. Every world should feel like it's unique play space in Bethesda's mind and that requires separation through loading. That would be fine if the planets themselves were a lot more dense. Typically you'll land on a planet and run about searching for things to do via your scanner, spotting perhaps 4 structures, three of which are simple scan spots with one being a generated dungeon. You'll also be limited in how far you can run from your ship, although the limit is so ludicrously far away that you'll never be too upset about it. When trying to identify what was exactly weak feeling about the exploration, I kept coming up short- I just knew it didn't feel as fun as it should.

Running through pre-generated dungeons can be fun enough for how the loot table works, there's a chance for great random stat weapons and perhaps a stat magazine or rare resource, but there's no cool uniques that can only be found in generated dungeons as far as I'm aware. There's also no great generated boss fights, just slightly tougher end dungeon enemies, and the pre-fabs aren't so numerous that you won't run into the same one quite regularly. But when coming back to the game at just over my hundredth hour, I think the real issue with exploration has dawned on me, and it's something I mentioned in my last paragraph- it's the density of content. These world's feel barren a lot of the time, with wide stretches between anything worth seeing. I think Bethesda's problem is that they assumed dungeons and landmarks were the only content that could fill such a world, and correctly assumed that overfilling any planet with that would kill the illusion of discovery- but they failed to get creative with it. Mini dungeon caves, underground ravines, Alien nests- content that would have made these planets feel more alive. Content which is lacking, sorely. A true creative failure on their part.

But for the content that is there, Starfield has it's fairly satisfying gunplay to rely on. Don't get me wrong, it's nowhere near as slick or refined as Cyberpunk 2077, but you can easily idenify all the improvements that Bethesda made upon Fallout 4's in terms of movement, recoil, gun weight, snappiness- all the elements that make up how fun a gun is to shoot. In the beginning with small groups I found the gunplay to be a bit clunky, but as the weapons got a bit more interesting with different shooting patterns and output rates and damage types- and as the enemies became more numerous and varied, the shooting really started to become exhilarating and exciting in it's best moments. Again, Cyberpunk clearly has the market in ideal RPG-grounded FPS shooting, but Starfield isn't a failure in this regard by any stretch of the imagination. Third person shooting does suck, however. Bethesda still haven't figured out, or even made any ground on, third person action gameplay. 

Unfortunately, such work runs coarse against the rigors of frankly poorly set AI which can make a failure out of otherwise fun encounters. Will all the work that Bethesda did throwing in a complex infliction system and distinct damage types, such as bleeding, in order to keep vastly underlevelled enemies as still a threat to the player- it's a shame they couldn't figure out how to get them to be more responsive to their environment, more mindful of their blindspots or even give them a bit more of a hair trigger so you'll have less moments of facing down a clueless looking mercenary you just popped around a corner on like they didn't even know they were in a fight. I think where this situation might be at it's worst is with the actual alien fauna.

Now firstly I must say that Bethesda did a commendable job designing these creatures to look bizarre and interesting, and to be distinct from planet to planet. No Man's Sky's small compendium of monster parts pales in comparison to Starfield's slate of genuinely distinct creatures, such that I'm always curious to examine a new one around the corner. Unfortunately, in AI these creatures are almost all carbon copies of one another. They charge and slap, or they throw surprisingly powerful debris at those out of slapping range. That's literally all of them. It's so bad that when I engaged in the Red Mile, a supposedly deathly 'Logan's Run' style death game sprint populated by wild animals, I couldn't stop yawning the entire way. Non human enemies are a genuine chore to fight, Bethesda dropped the ball seriously there.

To their credit, however, unlike with Fallout 4 shooting and combat is not the sole way you can interact with the world space. Starfield marks the reintroduction of worldly interaction into the galaxy and contrary to what all the marketing might have suggested, it's in interaction with the universe and it's various paths that this game shines the best. If you take the effort to apply yourself there are so many different sci-fi fantasies that Starfield can cater for. You can play a space trucker moving from port to port, dropping off supplies, escorting passengers and fending off the odd pirate. You can play the low-down smuggler, getting their hands on illicit goods and smuggling it through customs in order to sell it to the unscrupulous Trade Authority. You can be a Bounty Hunter, a Space Pirate, an interstellar Cowboy and a corporate fixer- and all these are decidedly freeform paths you can pick up and drop as you please. Unguided freedom is really the port of call in Starfield in a way that many will be overwhelmed by.

Expect Starfield to introduce you to everything that it does, treat it as purely surface level touching only the main quest, and you'll come away thinking this is the most shallow game Bethesda have ever made. Adopt a bit of initiative and you'll realise how utterly disingenuous that view would be; there's so much effort imbued into the simulation of the Starfield universe that with only a few small tweaks I can easily see a modder turning this into an 'Elite' Style space sim devoid of Bethesda style player-centric activities and quest givers. You have accurately simulated day and night cycles where each planet revolves and spins around it's sun as it should. You have time dilation taken into account, where you can set up an extraction unit, sleep one day on Venus and return to several days worth of resources because one day on Venus is 243 days in Universal time. There are simulated ecosystems made up of Predator animals, Prey animals and scavenger animals- such that you can slay some Prey, fend off the Predators and watch the tiny scavenger creatures crawl out of the ground to feast. There's such intricacy built into this game in a quiet, non flaunting, fashion that as you start to sit back and notice it's impossible not to be impressed.

Of course, these are largely background improvements to most people. The average player wants to know how the game will interact with them, and to this point Bethesda have the usual go-to: Quests and Questlines. The various side quests you'll go on in Starfield range from radiant jobs, such as 'clear out this hive' or 'deliver X amount of item here' to properly written side quests- and of the written variety I am pleasantly surprised by the team's glow up. Compared to Fallout 4, practically every single side quest in Starfield either presents unique scenarios, unfurls into a chain or just offers a new way to play into the role play fantasy you want. As I said, I can became a freakin' drug runner on the mean streets of Neon, who would have expected something like that? And we also have proper faction questlines for all the major forces in the Settled Systems alongside the Main Quest.

These faction questlines are where the Starfield quest generators can really let their juices flow and make some great highlight stand-out moments, such as escaping from an exploding ship caught in a electric Nebula or fending off alien beasts in a Wild West-style rock canyon. Unfortunately these aren't perfect and I do think there's a lack of ultimate conviction behind any of these faction narratives, I don't feel like any single writer was given free reign to create a really satisfying self contained narrative with any of these like what we had back in the days of Oblivion, but it's a lot better than Fallout 4's lack of faction questlines. Also, the Ryujin Industries questlines focuses heavily on Stealth but for some reason refuses to actually employ the game's stealth mechanics until the final mission, leaving most of the quests feeling stupidly easy. That final quest is a increadibly satisfying Deus Ex style sprawling level with mind hacks and ventilation shafts to crawl through, but I came away wishing the whole questline was full of those, rather than just the swan song.

As for the main questline, what Bethesda presents is probably one of their most risky attempts at a core story to date, in how much it relies on both your interaction with the faction members of Constellation and the fall-back on generation software to hide a few of the artifacts. (And the ending is pretty special as well, I suppose.) To it's credit I will say that I think the characters you interact with are the most fleshed out we've had in a Bethesda narrative thus far, but by that same merit they are also the least wild and creative characters we've interacted with. They feel human, but not really all that interesting. The missions themselves have some worthwhile highlight moments, even if the core quest is essentially designed to be a tutorial and tour of the game's locales and systems, and I think the finale gauntlet is perhaps one of the most satisfyingly chaotic final levels I've gone through in a Bethesda game. I'd call it decent, overall.

Then there's the ending. Honestly I fully understand why it's so divisive of a topic, for the exact same reason why I can't get behind stories where the legitimacy of the main character is disrupted by some reveal of them being a robot or a clone or something similarly as dismissive. There's a fundamental narrative block which some people can't get over. Personally, I have more of an explorative mindset so I can relate to both the philosophy of the finale and it's implications- but I can't pretend as though there isn't some distinct lack of closure with how Bethesda chose to handle things. Also, I think there's an almost wanton 'gamification' of sci-fi concepts here that almost matches the 'misunderstanding of topic' that Bioshock Infinite had with how it explained Elizabeth's Tears. (All I'm saying is that if the team went more of a 'Ground Hog Day' direction it would have made more sense than what they settled on.)

One of the big decisions made by Starfield was to optimise for 4k visuals which meant that consoles were left at 30 Frames capped- and now I've experienced well over 3 full days of play time I can conclude- it wasn't worth it. The sharpness of the picture, the washed out filters over every planet, all of it makes this game look muddy on a 4K display in a way that contemporary 4K titles like DMC5 and Hitman 3 just don't. And both of those games had their 4K versions built after the fact. Starfield's native 4k doesn't get a chance to settle in any appealing manner thanks to honestly amateur visual design choices that modders have already started fixing. Simply removing the tint does wonders for the game. You know else does wonders? 60 Frames per second. The game doesn't look terrible at 30- but it feels a lot better at 60. It's just one of those sore spots that ground at me more and more as I played the game, and I don't want to have to wait until the official texture pack DLC to finally appreciate the pop of the game.

On the other-end of the spectrum for things I had to wait to fully develop my opinion on- The levelling system is so much more long form than in other Bethesda games. Previously it was actually somewhat feasible to max out everything you want by the end of your first playthrough and spend the rest of your time playing catch-up, but Starfield is brimming with so many useful and genuinely experience altering perks, each of which require an actual investment of developing that specific skill in order to rank it up that you'll be building your character across multiple playthroughs. (I.e. Pilots need to destroy X amount of ships before they can go from Piloting class A to B- thus unlocking an entire new class of ship in the process.) It's a really engaging way to make the journey feel like it's contributing to your growth, even when you reached the very short end of the non-existent computer generated exploration worth. And for what it's worth, RPG stat speech checks have returned and they're pretty much everywhere! I've heard some reviewers comment how their traits and stat choice bared no impact on their Roleplaying and I can only assume they were tactic main quest addicts that never tried to do anything off the beaten path. There's tons of checks across the game, most of which allow for a bypass to a speech check or simple tasks or even just a boost to companion affinity when everyone gets a taste of how darn knowledgeable you are!

Of the various planets and locales in the game, those that Bethesda did take the time to build by hand are all impressively character-rich and feel like large lived in cities. Even the relatively small Akilia has that rustic western charm, and the stuffiness of New Atlaneans that many feared would paint the entire galaxy of Starfield touches is a purposeful choice for distinction- which I can thus appreciate. Visually, New Atlantis is quiet a site to behold and Neon is such a fun jungle gym to get lost in (even if it does have a few too many loading screens.) There's actually so many little pockets of civilisation doing their own thing for you to discover, like a space station know as 'The Clinic', the number one centre for medical professionals in the galaxy. Or 'The Red Mile', a sleezy bar which happens to home to a death game. (It's a disappointing boring death game, but it's the thought that counts.) This feels like an intentional antithesis of Fallout 4's overwhelming reliance on shooting galleries over meaningful pockets of interactable civilisation- and I see what Fallout 4 should have been in it's face.

 

Ship building is a very large part of Starfield, made so from the impressive amount of versatility available from weapon modules to engines to landing gears to even the Habs that make up your ship and a whole bunch of cool wings and cowling to nail the overall look of the thing. As the ship is essentially your secondary character, it's important to get it just right for your needs, which is why it can be so interesting becoming familiar with all the various design quirks of different ship manufacturers. (I just wish more companies would provide armour stands in the armouries. So far I've only found one that does it.) And ship combat can be an interesting, if mixed, bag. If you invest into absolutely no flying skills at all than ship combat is just an often frustrating damage check against a swarm of enemies. Invest in the booster skill and systems targeting and specific weapon type boosting, and you'll find yourself pulling off evasive boosts, slipping behind enemies for bursts of damage before peeling off and getting cornered and on-the-fly system changes. I wish there was a way to slow things every down now and then, as ship combat can be a bit overly hectic, but when it's good it's really good, and when it's bad it feels utterly miserable. 

The performances of the cast are all decently done, even if some of the core cast's characters are a tad more dry than you might hope for. I found myself connecting somewhat with Sarah for her heartfelt conviction with the idea of exploration, very much in rhythm with the heart of the game, and Sam felt down to earth although I have some lingering questions about her daughter's heritage considering the fact that she shares the exact same mixed-race model as three other quest important children despite the fact that both her parents are white. (Seriously, how'd that happen?) Barrett feels like he was written by someone who thought they were more entertaining than they were, I just found him a drag to be around. Andreja is intriguing and mysterious and probably the most interesting by a country mile. All of these characters are deeply entwinned with the core narrative and the levels to which you have to get to know them before they start pouring out their deepest darkest secrets really helps to sell the relationship in a way that Fallout 4 couldn't. Still, I wouldn't consider any one of these character on even the same stratosphere as the Baldur's Gate 3 cast. 

Summary

It took me a very long time to figure out quite how I feel about Starfield, because it's a huge game with so many systems working on it- so much seems deeply familiar to what we know from Bethesda whilst details you would never expect seem almost hidden and tucked away. Peeling away the secrets of Starfield has been both exhilarating and disappointing and trying to balance the overall of the situation feels like trying to balance on the point of a needle. But with some reflection I think the best way I can break this down is piece by piece and with comparisons. Firstly: Starfield excels at fixing all the fundamental problems and issues that Bethesda had with their creative direction when they were making Fallout 4. Returned questlines, better companions, actual settlements, RPG flavouring and speech checks and all that goodness, it's all there. Secondly: Starfield fails spectacularly at everything it set out to do in order to define Starfield as a distinct new IP. Space travel feels choppy and disconnected, exploration is dull and empty and there's no core gameplay arc different from Elder Scrolls or Fallout outside of ship combat. (Which, admittedly, is decent. In the right circumstances.) What results is a game that feels good in the parts made by Bethesda, and utterly unfinished in all the many areas left to the whims of a pitiful generation system that's about on-par with Alpha build Minecraft. (No... it's much worse than that.)

Starfield isn't a bad game, and it is by no means a shallow one- I think those that have angled in such directions in their reviews are literally manifesting their own prejudices on the games. But it does feel outdated. Severely so. Not just for it's visuals, I have nothing against the Bethesda style of game visuals and those that do tend to complain all the way up until mods come out, because that's as far as their conviction on that matter extends. But for their brand of RPG in general, Bethesda feels out of touch- and to be fair it isn't exactly their fault. It's actually Bethesda's poor fortune to release just a month after a game that totally redefined the extent to which an RPG can go- Baldur's Gate 3, which makes the quaint two-choice mission questlines feel like relics from a decade previously, wherein a year ago that would be lauded as serviceable RPG potential. This means that even at it's best, the handcrafted sections of the game, Starfield feels overshadowed by it's betters.

Still, I think Starfield is fun, and presents a neat rhythm to its gameplay and replayability captured neatly by their New Game Plus system which I can see reinvigorating playthroughs for a few months at the least. Bethesda have also dedicated themselves to support this game for "years and years", to perhaps make those exploration sections worth a damn over time, but today we review the game that's here, not the one the promise to make by the end of it's life cycle. As such I will present a tentative recommend for those with a love for Bethesda games that found Fallout 4 a little empty and wondered what that title would have felt like as an RPG again- here's the feels. In an overall scoring sense things are less peachy, with a number scorer this would be a little easier but I've established my semi academic rating system for years now so I'll have to paint within my lines... And despite everything I've said, although it fails to excite, Starfield has managed to hook me, and for that alone I can bump the game up from the C+ it probably deserves to a -B Grade on my arbitrary review scale- above the average. Is this a Game of the Year contender? Absolutely not, maybe if it released a year ago but the progress of the industry has not been kind in reflection to Starfield. I remain curious as to what might come, and Bethesda's promises ring with some potential... but I wonder if this game will remain relevant enough to become worthy of itself. Time will tell.