Games can have long gestations, and Starfield is a prime example. Sometimes this works in the games favor, sometimes not so much and Starfield’s nearly decade long development has left it somewhere in the middle. It’s not a terrible game, but it’s also not the revelation many were hoping for. Let me explain.
Many have called Starfield since its first reveal “Fallout in Space”. I never played a Fallout game before (my shame on this is high before you start!), but I did play a silly amount of Skyrim, and for me it's more Skyrim in space but with guns. If you played either of Bethesda’s previous games then you will pretty much know what you are getting here, and that is both a good and a bad thing.
The game introduces the new universe of its most venerable of creators with an opening sequence showcasing what the development team dubs its ‘NASA punk’ aesthetic, though if you are familiar with the term ‘dirty technology’ popularized by films such as the Alien franchise then you will be immediately familiar with the concept.
It depicts workers working, miners searching for minerals on a distant planet and does actually quite a good job of showing the dev’s ideas for how space exploration would go based on the technology and development of it that is happening now in the world. It’s a cool look and while not the most original take on how humans would actually reach the stars, gets the point across nicely.
Unfortunately, a few minutes into this sequence is where the game’s biggest problem, at least for me, starts. You encounter an artifact while mining that gives you an eerie vision and kick starts the main story of the game and while it looks awesome, well that’s about it, it looks awesome. I will come back to this later.
From there a robust character creator allows you to customize your in-game persona, along with various traits that give you different dialog options and a few other things throughout your play through. For example, picking the Kids Stuff trait means you can go visit your parents on the main hub world of Jemison, but also that 2% of all your credits are sent back to them every week. Each trait has both upsides and downsides, but the three you can pick give you a good starting point for your character.
One cool thing I found about the Kids Stuff trait is that when you go see your parents their look is directly inspired by the face you craft in the character creator. It doesn’t sound like much, but seeing how your character would have inherited certain features from their parents is a neat touch and really shows the level of thought that has been put into the game.
From there, you are recruited into an organization called Constellation, which is dedicated to studying the artifact you found in the mine as well as being granted your first ship. The game begins to open out from there, and as you start to go to various planets you find everything from absolutely nothing, to small outposts to large industrial operations.
Unfortunately, this boils down to little more than combat arenas. Some side quests give more depth to such locations, but just picking a planet and traveling to it, you can scan it from orbit to find these points of interest. When you land it is rare to find a place completely empty, but these aren’t scripted characters with quests, more just a band of pirates or marauders trying to pick the place clean of anything valuable with a ‘shoot first’ mentality. So you gain XP, weapons and spacesuits (the game's equivalent of armor) and some of the hundreds of resources, but any kind of depth is lacking outside of the scripted missions.
I am torn on this aspect of the game, because there is certainly more of an exploration element than many have given it credit for, however, that exploration rewards you with stuff and not especially exciting stuff at that. There is a chance you will get a legendary weapon or suit, especially if the enemies are a high level, but other than that its ammo and resources. If the game had more moments where you find something random and cool on just a few of the planets then it would make it worth it but as it stands it just forms part of the overall grind.
Exploration in Starfield won’t be for everyone, as the devs seem to have over compensated for the idea that people like fast travel by making anywhere fast travelable, from anywhere. It would make sense if you had to take off in your ship first and then could jump to the planet in question but that’s not the case. Pulling up the star map while on the ground and finding a planet and hitting ‘set course’ if you see you in orbit if you haven’t already been in just a few seconds, or on the ground at a POI if you have.
It makes it so that while sure, you can explore from your ship and do the cool jump animation, there is little to no point. It also, and this is a crying shame, makes the ships themselves feel kinda redundant. As I said previously if they just made it so you had to be in orbit to be able to fast travel it would give the ships a bit more of a purpose, but as it stands you have to make the conscious decision to do that, rather than the game promoting it. It also flies in the face of the idea that the game is about space exploration and not just a series of quests strung together.
To be fair, there are plenty of quests, so it's not like you never have anything to do. Just walking around one of the inhabited planets will see you overhearing conversations NPC’s are having amongst themselves that will have the UI pop up a ‘Activity found’ notification and give you a small side quest to do. It’s a cool way to do the discovery of such things and certainly gives these area’s a better sense of life, though the fact that many of the voice lines that create these activities repeat every time you go to a place and don’t do the mission takes the shine off it.
Some of the larger quest lines are really good, but never the main one. The Crimson Fleet quest line, and the Freestar Ranger line are cool stories of misadventures in space, things that again, feel like they are the logical progression of humanity's voyage to the stars. Plus the Freestar Rangers one makes you a space cowboy/girl, which is never not cool. The main quest though, is a real disappointment.
The Constellation quest line which forms the main story of the game is good in some spots, as it provides lots of NPC’s to interact with, some of which you can even romance and a good excuse to travel to some of the more distant planets on the map. However, it just doesn’t fit with the rest of the game. Without getting too spoilery, the main point of it is to find temples that let you into just one room, with what is admittedly a very cool device at the center. Once this activates, you have to travel through points of light dotted around the room and once you have done that enough times you are granted a little cutscene and what is essentially a new super power. You then rinse and repeat this until you have enough to move the story forward, but that doesn’t mean you have got them all.
These powers range from a gravitational wave that knocks enemies back to surrounding yourself with a bubble of atmosphere that stops your oxygen levels dropping. All are universally pointless. I tested a couple out when I got them, but found that I completely forgot about them in combat or any other instance because they are just not needed at all. It’s an addition that just isn’t needed, isn’t fully explained by the story and adds an unnecessary layer of mysticism. The game would have been much better served with the main story being some tale of political intrigue centered around the various factions, but instead we get pointless powers that don’t fit with the logical progression the rest of the game espouses.
The main gameplay is your relatively basic FPS, with various weapons ranging from, and I am not kidding here, an AK-47 (or the ‘old earth rifle’) to particle beam weapons and even swords and grenades/mines. You get a good selection of weapons and there are different rarities of all of them along with four categories for each…which gets confusing quickly.
Basically, the categories denote how powerful a given weapon is. You would think that picking up something that says ‘legendary’ on it would do the same job, but apparently not. The four categories are base, calibrated, refined and finally advanced, with each increasing the power of the weapon. Then you have the rarities, which are common, rare, epic and legendary and these add perks to the weapon that do something like give extra damage to alien creatures or apply a bleeding effect.
Honestly, the perks are fairly pointless and just confuse the system. It would have been better to add the perks to the mods you can add to weapons and just have the tier system. It would have made so much more sense and give you more of a reason to put points into the weapon engineering skill on the rather vast skill tree rather than this mess of a system that I was constantly confused by.
The gun play isn’t great, but is perfectly serviceable and gives good reasons to put points into the various combat skills on the skill tree, as they do actually make life a little bit easier, but I do mean a little bit. I was able to get headshots with the sniper rifles with only one point on the rifle skill and nothing on the sniper skill so it does the job, but I always felt it necessary to have one of each type of weapon on me at all times, preferably with each having a different ammo type so that I always had options in some of the more combat heavy areas of the game.
To be fair that is just my own paranoia, you really only need to carry a couple of weapons at a time to save on encumbrance, which yes, is still a thing. Being over encumbered just makes your oxygen level drop more quickly depending on just how over the limit you are, and prevents fast traveling. It’s not really a problem, but again, is kinda pointless and doesn’t really add anything but annoyance to the game. While better than the system in Skyrim, it’s only real purpose seems to be to gate progress so you aren’t just loading up on tons of resources and crafting all the best stuff as soon as possible.
Speaking of the crafting system, it's…complex to say the least. There are hundreds of resources in the game, both organic and inorganic, that are used to craft weapon and spacesuit mods, food and medical supplies and the basic components needed for the base building aspect of the game. It’s another system I am torn on, as I do believe there are simply too many resources and it makes the whole thing frustrating to deal with, but also it encourages planetary exploration and base building so there is a reason for it. That’s not to say you can’t simply buy them from certain vendors, and there are even some that specialize in resources, but getting one to ten items of a given resource from them is not quite the same as mining it yourself.
You mine inorganic resources by going to an empty spot on a planet, putting down a beacon and constructing a base. What you can build is limited by certain other resources you can build at industrial workbenches dotted around outposts, cities and eventually your ship, but if you have the stuff you can create fairly expansive bases with defenses against local wildlife and pirates.
Scanning a planet from orbit lets you see what resources are available on it, and if you choose the right spot you can mine two or three at a time and even create habs and landing pads for your ships. It’s a cool aspect of the game and can get the creative juices flowing, as well as being the best way to get resources. Pick a planet that is high level and has an abundant amount of alien creatures and you also pick up plenty of inorganic materials as well, plus that ever useful xp if you want to grind some levels out.
The base building is vastly overshadowed, however, by the ship building. While you get various ships throughout the course of the game, and can even board and hijack ships that are attacking you, building your own is extremely satisfying and can get very creative. People are already creating various famous spaceships from other media, as well as ships for different functions in the game. This might range from light and fast fighters to heavy cargo haulers and everything in between.
Getting it right and creating a cool looking ship is pretty easy once you understand the nuisances of the system, but you can’t just start building, you have to have a ship to modify in the first place. It’s a bit daft but not a big problem, since as previously stated various ships are granted to you over the course of the game. I just don’t understand why you can’t click ‘create new ship’ and start from scratch, seems a weird omission to me.
Spending hours tinkering in the ship and base builders will be a highlight for some, and a chore for others, it really depends on what you like, but if there is one thing you can’t level at Starfield it's that you don’t have plenty to do. Quests and activities come thick and fast, and I finished my time with the game with plenty of stuff to take on if I so chose, but with a hundred and twenty hours behind me, I was ready to leave the universe of Starfield behind, despite the fast travel system meaning that jumping around to finish everything out would become trivial at best.
I did have some technical issues with the game, mainly due to the fact I initially installed it to an SSD that wasn’t my M.2 drive and that caused some issues with assets loading in. Once I moved it, while I still got audio lagging behind in spots and frame rate dips just walking around, the game played smoothly and looked great even on my most modest of systems. There was weird jank, like your robot companion Vasco being stood on the nose of your ship, outside, as you came into land, but was silly and not game breaking. I did have a couple of crashes to desktop, but they were few and far between.
Ultimately, if you like Fallout or Skyrim, you will probably like Starfield. It has some very cool ideas and the base and ship building systems are robust enough to keep you engaged for hours. The problem comes from the fact that it is very much like the previous games from its creator, and games as a whole have moved on from the systems employed in those so that the whole thing feels more than a little dated.
Don’t get me wrong, the graphics can be beautiful and the voice acting, though repeated too often in some spots, can be spot on, but the game just doesn’t feel like a modern RPG. It sometimes doesn’t respect the players time and can give off the impression that the devs tried to overcompensate for that and that created a whole other set of problems for it. It’s a shame, because the universe it creates is really cool, so long as you don’t take into account the frankly stupid rinse and repeat of the main quest line.
I really want Bethesda to get another go and create a Starfield 2 with updated mechanics and take on board all the fair criticism leveled at it. Some, in my opinion, have been way too harsh on it, some not so much, but the base of the game is a solid foundation to be built upon with a sequel. If you like Bethesda’s games, then there is plenty for you, if you don’t then there is nothing here that will change your mind. With a hundred and twenty hours of the game in my belt however, I can honestly say it's a game worth a go, even if it isn’t perfect by any means.