Starfield: Bethesda’s newest frontier
This month the much anticipated Starfield was released by Bethesda. As I initially cut my teeth in the Space RPG subgenre in the late 2000’s and have been a fan of the subgenre since, the editor thought it’d be best for me to review this.
With a starting price of £70, the question is: Starfield, is it worth the money?
No.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, forewarning is needed. This review briefly, and as lightly as I can, contains spoilers. No story beats or twists are revealed, just the names of two important NPC’s.
We start off with a Bethesda staple, the overly long introduction sequence. You would think, with Fallout 3, 4, Oblivion, and Skyrim all having popular mods that skip the intro, Bethesda would have learnt by now. Alas, they haven’t after 17 years. You go through the meandering intro up to the character creation screen, awakening after a strange incident in a hospital bed with a mirror being handed to you. It’s a subtle reference to Fallout: New Vegas and how the character customisation there is introduced. It is also the only reference to a good game I found.
Perks have been restored, though many are just bonuses with one of the factions, three stuck out to me: Dream Home, Kid Stuff, and Hero Worshipped. Starting me off with a 125,000 credit mortgage (for what is revealed to be an empty house so I never bothered), 2% of my earnings going to my family who, as preset figures in a Bethesda RPG, i have no reason to care for, and an adoring fan just like in Oblivion and just as handy.
The character customisation does away with the standard male/female presets, until you realize they just replaced “male” and “female” with Body Type A and Body Type B. The option to select pronouns seems nice, but comes across as a hollow platitude when you remember Bethesda is currently being sued for transphobia in the workplace.
Very quickly you learn something that already diminishes the quality of this game. Sure, from a technical standpoint it’s good. The graphics are nice, the game is stable and not as buggy as you’d expect from Todd “It just works” Howard. But in the Space RPG where you adventure through space, interstellar travel is loading screens.
Without hyperbole, whoever greenlit this travel system should be ashamed. I’m ashamed.
Obviously, the game has loading screens. To have everything all loaded in at once is unrealistic but the issue is with how it works, how it fits together to strip the space travel out of a Space RPG.
Elite Dangerous, a space sandbox sim made by Frontier Studios, smoothes its loading screens well. Where Starfield plays a small animation sometimes before showing a loading screen, Elite Dangerous has this animation of your ship flying between systems the whole time giving a much smoother, more immersive experience. The issues aren’t just the transitions to generic loading screens though. Every part of this games navigation is dependent on fast travel. Fast travel to your ship, open the map, instantly select your destination, fast travel there. Or, if that’s not an enjoyable enough experience, you can just open the menu and fast travel to different planets without returning to your ship.
The almost entire removal of the ship as a vehicle from the game guts what is a core part of a Space RPG from the bulk of play.
But this is not the only issue. Unlike Bethesda’s previous work Starfield is a lot less open. Cities are composed of smaller areas, connected to each other through more loading screens. It gives the feel of a highly segmented game that, if you look just beneath the surface, is as vapid and empty as the flight.
Bethesda loves environmental storytelling, they love leaving notes, journals, computer entries, they love that. Look up the amount of books in Skyrim, walk into any building in Fallout 3 or 4 and browse the terminals for flavour and story on where you are. Starfield is barren of the flavoured writing Bethesda injects to their games.
This leads to a big issue. Exploration just isn’t fun. In an interview, Managing Director Ashley Cheng compared players concerns of an empty planet to the first US Moon Landing, a comparison which Todd stood by. Ignoring how a £70 piece of media made to entertain is incomparable to an event heralded as a great achievement that was the result of two global superpowers grandstanding, the idea that the boringness of the planets underlines the “grounded science” is laughable.
Starfield is not based on grounded science. The technology used to travel the stars is built entirely on a fictional Maguffin of Bethesda’s own creation.
Which brings us to the story.
Starfield is a game about being bored. You fly around and do various tasks to acquire mysterious fragments before being accosted by strangers. No, these aren’t the strangers in Neon City who will spout dialogue at you as you walk down the street, giving you half a dozen sidequests, these are other strangers.
These mysterious strangers don’t want you to get these fragments and will resort to the very grounded and real art of magic to do so. For a few minutes then they just give up.
Combat here is very much comparable to Fallout 3. It takes place in mostly same-y locations, again making the game dry, and exploration as appealing as an intestinal worm.
Weapons can be modified, however to do so would be a miracle as I was unable to find a single weapon station in my entire playthrough. The weapons you can find are varied, melee, pistols, rifles, shotguns, the usual weapon types you’d expect. However, there are some oddities. Some weapons are based on real world guns, the AK-47m being the most easily identifiable. However, in the year 2330, somebody is still producing the ammunition, and the rifles chamber in 7.62x39mm, a caliber of ammunition that Russia stopped using in the 1970’s.
There’s severe disconnect between the more sci-fi looking firearms and the weapons which, even by today’s standards are on the old side.
The combat isn’t even all that fun. Enemies are almost all bullet sponges, save for some at the end which are gimmicky bullet sponges. Playing through the game the combat felt less exciting and more another chore. I have to kill all the bad guys so I can go get the next Maguffin.
Moving away from combat, there’s mechanics the game has that it doesn’t utilise in the main line. Outposts, which while they become an option for something in the main story, can easily be ignored. There’s no need for these outposts aside from resource harvesting which again isn’t given much focus. If a game is to have research, crafting, and settlement building then it does well to properly utilize them instead of shackling them to an already banal experience.
No Mans Sky, a game with superficially similar themes, handles this much better. Base Building is a core component allowing players to have a brief respite from hazardous weather, harvest resources, or just have fun. Fun. I remember when Space RPGs were fun.
To speak somewhat more positively, Bethesda “experimented.” Persuasion has seen a face lift, instead of clicking one persuade dialogue it has become a minigame. Each persuasion attempt has you trying to fill points, with options having a score based on it’s difficulty. It’s still easy to fail easy options and while you can bank auto-persuades they accrue slowly. Although in reality this is a regression! Oblivion had this mechanic, and then subsequently removed it for every new game they’ve made
Lockpicking is the same, instead of rotating the bobbypin you now use a digipick, which is consumed on use, or a redo, and has you using circles with pins in them to fill the rings of the lock.
Youtuber Hbomberguy remarked once that he has the pet theory that all hacking and lockpicking minigames are bad, and he is correct. No matter how innovative or fun your minigame is, playing it repeatedly will get tedious, it will get boring, and people will make mods that skip it entirely.
I have more, the Editor, knows I have pages of notes. Everything from how the reward for completing the Ryujin Corporation Questline is underwhelming and underutilized in dialogue throughout the entirety of the game, to how incredibly unpolished the stealth system is, to how vendors will often dump exposition and a sidequest on you when you first try and use them, to how the ships customisation and modification systems are almost entirely wasted because aside from one jump in the game the ship you start with is basically fine, all to how all the companions are bland and uninteresting, to the point where the Adoring Fan (an Oblivion reference) is the most easily recognisable.
At this point, cloud gaming has crashed due to the traffic Starfield is undeservedly getting, and while I’m glad people are playing through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate instead of paying an overinflated price for this, I must confess. I haven’t beaten Starfield.
Intending on tackling both endings, I started first with the Emissary ending. One I was underprepared for because in a game of slow, boring combat, I did not expect to be struck with three different conditions (which all have multiple subconditions) in a prolonged gauntlet of gimmicky fights.
As I’m writing this, Cloud Gaming has a queue for all of their games and Starfield, a game I wanted to finish so I can properly assess both endings, is going to end up much like Saints Row (2022). Unfinished, incomplete, and leaving me with a foul taste in my mouth.
Starfield had a ship customisation system that excelled Elite Dangerous, coming closer to Platinum Games and Nude Maker’s Infinite Space. It had the time, and the budget and the team to make something great, to be Bethesda’s Magnum Opus in technical prowess and what it had to offer. But instead, for £70 they offer this, a dry, repetitive, closed in game that is neither fun to explore nor absorb.
