My experience with Bethesda games has been mostly positive. I liked Oblivion and Skyrim, and even queued outside a store in the rain at midnight for the latter. Since then, I watched developer Bethesda deal some serious damage to their Fallout franchise with 76 and re-release Skyrim to the point of nauseum. I had no faith left to justify buying Starfield. Yet the whole gaming industry felt the presence of this game in the September release window, and I was bored.
For the doubters, like me, Microsoft had an extra trick up their sleeve. I didn’t have to buy this game, I could play it on Gamepass on launch day, the 6th of September 2023, provided I had access to an Xbox Series console or a PC.
I don’t normally subscribe to Gamepass, I like having physical copies of games, or at the very least some assurance that the game won’t magically disappear from a subscription library on a whim. But for a game I had some apprehensions about … Gamepass is a perfect storm, I can test this out without needing to pay full retail.
I’m weirdly glad to say, Starfield’s first impressions were better than I expected.
From an objective standpoint, I think it’s important to go into a new IP, with some element of open-mindedness. How much, is subject to debate, but I gave a lot of benefit of the doubt to No Man’s Sky and that has slowly been repaid. I’m constantly, and perhaps naively, giving the benefit of the doubt to Star Citizen, and… if that ever releases, we’ll see if I made the right choice.
It’s only fair that I give that same chance to Starfield.
The game begins with your character in a mine, breaking rocks to pay the bills. You touch a glowy protrusion and get knocked out. Upon waking up, you enter the character creator – which contains a good amount of customisation options, and importantly, gives you a chance to pick which skills you start with.
Shortly after, you’re presented with the tutorial fight, as you and your miner colleagues beat down some pirates. Plot events happen and you get a ship and fly to the city of New Atlantis. This is the game’s big opening hub city and it’s damn impressive. Walking into the spaceport here, and then looking for shops and points of interest really hammers home the scale that Bethesda was working with. You then meet members of an organisation called the Constellation and go in search of more artifacts.
That’s pretty much all you need to know about the main story without spoilers, and to be honest, the majority of the game’s content will be experienced outside of these story moments. Barring some surprises in NG+, this story is serviceable, but propped up by the factions and lore elements within this world that you need to branch out from this main path to truly appreciate.
Even just on the starter city of New Atlantis, the divide between those who live and work on the surface and those who subsist in the underground “Well” area provide strong world-building foundations, and an inherent socio-economic conflict, to deliver intriguing character interactions – providing you actually go looking for them. These are these little microcosms to unpick on every planet with a city and fuel the majority of the better writing and character development.
Alternatively, you can just decide to be “free.” There are a plethora of options available to you once you settle into the world and you don’t have to follow the narrative once you get to New Atlantis. You could decide to explore the nearby systems or jump a star over and check out Earth. You can pick up some generated missions to earn some credits, or wander around the city and shop, or decide to start your life of crime.
Yes, they all sound fairly standard, but this is very much like other Bethesdagames in the best and worst ways.If what you want is to role play a character in this world, you can do it. If what you want is to min-max money and EXP, you can do that too.
I’d recommend hitting the main story a bit though as this is where you meet a lot of the characters and get your companions.
Like other Bethesda games some of these are going to grind your eardrums and infuriate you. Some are going to be painfully obnoxious and others are going to be your trusted sidekicks who you love to be around. There’s a certain level of “safe” in all of these characters which left me struggling to pick a favourite. The game forces Sarah upon you first, and I found her brand of intellectual disapproval to be more “yes, mum” than “Yes, mommy.” I was confident I didn’t like the robot Vasco, whose voice isn’t loveably robotic, it’s painfully slow and paused and was incredibly irritating.
One positive I will note is that there are a lot of named characters here, and the character models are all unique. You’re unlikely to come across a copy and paste vendor or quest giver characters, even if some of the unnamed citizens are placed in weird locations and their generic one liners are painful to hear more than a few times.
In terms of gameplay Starfield has a variety of elements to choose from, but the primary actions fall under three headings – combat, RPG mechanics, and base or ship building.
Let’s discuss combat first as that’s one of the more common activities you’ll be doing. This is a first person game by default, but the option to play third person is always there. Combat is mostly ranged with guns, or up close and personal with melee weapons. Each style of combat can be performed by each character, provided they have such a weapon, but proficiency and effectiveness are determined by skills modifiers. It’s these skills that I’ll touch on later, but weapons can have different effects and guns and suit pieces can be modified to improve them in specific ways.
Gunplay has certainly improved on what we last saw from Bethesda in Fallout. It’s lacking flair at times, and most of the weapons feel painfully mundane for a futuristic setting, but it’s more than functional. I’d say this is similar to CyberPunk2077’s gunplay if you’ve looking for a “feel” comparison. The major downsides are that hit detection is a little off with some weapons and there are a lot of world objects you should be able to shoot through but can’t. Melee gameplay is very frantic if you don’t have any skills to augment your attacks, and tends to benefit stealth heavily. As you’d expect you can throw grenades, take cover, sneak around, take a non-lethal approach or run in all guns blazing, but the end goal is still “make all the red dots disappear.”
Another area that has seen some gains is the enemy AI. This still needs a lot of work, but if you’re coming into this from Fallout, you’ll notice an improvement. Human enemies will retreat and move behind cover rather than rushing right at you. They’re less easy to bait out into choke points and don’t bunch up as much. They still do stupid things from time to time, but then again, so does your companion.
These get in the way a lot and I really did think that what was missing here was the ability to tell your companion to “do something” like attack, go here, take cover. If they’re going to be this bad, you we need the option to put a location in your crosshair and tell them to go there to address pathing or combat issues.
Once your enemies are dead, you take everything useful off their corpses, and loot your surroundings. You can find resources, healing items, weapons and armour along with junk items to sell. These are all par-for-the course for Bethesda games, and the only issue I had early on was a lack of inventory space to put it all. You get better at learning what to take and what to leave as you play a bit more of the game, and some resources come in more useful than others as you can craft, research and mod gear with these, and pull some legendary or rare gear off your foes to help your next encounter.
As you fight or quest you level up and can unlock more skills. To reach the next rank of skill you have to meet certain challenge criteria, such as scanning a number of planets to improve your scanning skill. These ranks within skills are what make up the bulk of your intended progression, but also contribute towards what feels like progression bloat. There are so many abilities here that drive key aspects of gameplay, that you need to put points in them. Nothing is mandatory, but some, like the jetpack boost skill are almost essential to get around planets without crippling boredom. Others, like Outpost building and Habitation are needed to actually use one of the better in-game mechanics. It’s great there’s a lot of useful skills that affect gameplay and that you can customise your character to be unique, but acquiring these skills feels like a chore.
Having to complete a challenge and then dump another point in these does mean that the road to unlocking the skills you might want, is long, and that’s not helped by the lack of a respecc feature. You can customise your appearance at any point but cannot re-allocate your points. There’s no level cap, so eventually you can get every skill, and what you prioritise is up to how you want to play, but if you’ve made a mistake early on, and don’t realise this until level 15, then you might have wasted some of your most efficiently acquired levels on a scattershot of science skills that leave you weak in combat.
The “no respecc” option was a bit of a red flag as this was also a missing system at launch in Fallout76, and a slow reallocation system was added to that game after launch. This wouldn’t have bothered me so much if levelling up didn’t feel slow. I’m aware that there are dedicated guides to get exp fast but the “normal” amount you’re given as you naturally play and quest feels tuned on the low side. I think it would feel like less work if each skill only had two ranks to master rather than four, and would have helped me feel like I’d progressed more.
The menu system also deserves some patch attention. Moving items between inventories is noticeably awkward and a nice QoL feature would be to let you move items to your companion’s inventory from within your own, rather than having to enter a conversation and “request” access. In general moving any item from your self, to your ship, to outposts and vendors is very unintuitive, and it’s not always clear if you’re in the buy or sell mode at each vendor, or from which inventory, unless you know where to look. Inventory management is a huge part of the game, and some minor UI changes, or colour coding these would be a good idea, even if the entire system isn’t redone.
This game does pause when you enter the menu, so this poor inventory UI doesn’t hurt as much as it did in the always online 76. As for an additional nitpick, you can assign these items to quick slots, by “favouriting” them, but why wasn’t this just called “Assign to quickslot?”
The same could also be said of fast travel, a system that I really liked in principle. In a world this big you don’t always want to feel like you have to redo the boring parts. It’s a good choice to let me walk from my ship to an outpost, and then quickly hop back rather than treading the already walked path.
Perhaps the biggest issue I have with the game systems is mapping, or rather, a lack thereof. It makes sense that when landing on a random instance of a planet’s surface you don’t have the full topography until you go there, but when you land in New Atlantis and you’re searching for a specific shop or building – say for a quest – you can’t just open a map that shows these.
Undoubtedly one of this game’s highlights was its ship customisation mechanic. What you begin with is a functional light craft that sets the tone well. You really feel like this ship is physicalised potential, and when you progress a little further and get the opportunity to customise and improve on this – I started to see what Bethesda’s vision for Starfield was. I never trust my ability to “make” in games like this and I went and bought a pre-built ship with more cargo space and an industrial theme, but there’s a competent design tool if you’ve got that creative spark.
What truly struck me about Fallout 4 – a game I felt was solid, but buggy – was the world. It was about this morphed landscape that retained vestiges of its former form, the contrast between the crumbling architecture of man and the land slowly reclaimed by nature. What gives Starfield life, is potential, and that is mostly portrayed through this ship. Your ability to edit it and build upon it helps you become attached to it, and it plays such a vital part in how you experience the rest of this game.
Saving up for a new ship or a new ship module allows you to set your own goals and gives you a gameplay relevant reason to go out and make lots of credits, as the gameplay itself failed to do that for me. This customisation is undoubtedly the part of the game I appreciated the most, even if ship flying and combat is mostly a bit underwhelming, and even more so if you haven’t put any skills in the tech tree.
The detriment to this is very much in the way that key aspects of any space game, are landing and taking off. This game is not trying to be No Man’s Sky, Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen, but when leaving a planet and arriving at one are just cutscenes you have no control over, it does leave you feeling a bit underwhelmed, like you’re being forced to fast travel, instead of having the option to do it yourself.
Base building falls into a similar camp too, you use your resources and set up automated outposts to mine raw ingredients and then even fabricate more complex ones. This provides your character a supply chain to fund upgrades, research or just to sell for profit. You can station your companions and recruitable NPCs at these locations or on your ship to get bonuses, and set up your own automated empire, should you wish. Don’t expect this to be like Factorio, Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program, but it’s certainly a strong foundation for base building gameplay, let down only by terribly Janky controls on PC.
In an effort to keep this from being too long of a video, I’m glossing over a lot of the smaller, traditional “Bethesda” things that you’re probably familiar with from their previous games. I can’t justify how I feel about this game with evidence, but this really does feel very similar to all the other Bethesda games that I’ve played before. So much so, that I felt like I’d played this already, even though I hadn’t. That hurts this game more than you’d think. Something set in such a different setting to the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, and a brand new IP no less, should feel like steps have been taken to evolve that formula, and aside from a few small things here and there, this really didn’t feel like it takes into account 12 years of technological, or ideological progress from how Skyrim was designed. If what you wanted was Fallout in space, then this is going to shoot to the top of your Game of the Year list.
For those who played The Outer Worlds, an Obsidian game that is another example of Fallout in space, one of the biggest problems was how the NPCs just look right at you, it was very unnatural. Starfield seems to have steered hard in other direction to avoid this, as a lot of the NPCs look, around you. This is more awkward, but also quite natural, yet there’s still a bit of an issue with the camera being fixed during most interactions that feels aggressively constrained.
The most impressive thing about Starfield is how it handles itself technically, as this is by far the most stable Bethesda game I’ve played, end of story. This feat is more impressive given the scale here too. Even the visual glitches and pathing issues here are less frequent and this did run fairly smoothly and was very bug free.
This comes with a massive performance cost though, and Starfield was the first game that managed to get my GPU above 90% utilisation. There were some moments when this dipped below 60fps too, this was mostly when landing or leaving a planet or walking around New Atlantis during the daytime. This game is missing DLSS which likely hurts Nvidia GPUs that need this feature to show their best work. It’s clear Starfield is better optimised for AMD cards, but this game is very demanding and the graphical presentation doesn’t always justify the performance overhead.
There are undeniably some other problems with Starfield, mostly things that make this game feel more last gen than it ought to. Walking on snow leaves no footprints, and diving into the water in New Atlantis doesn’t get your clothes wet. There’s also this weird “head turning” where my avatar would look hard to the left for no reason, and the way that loading screens and instancing works on planets. To say that the majority of the areas you land in are instanced anyway, having buildings you have to “sub instance” into, separated by a loading screen feels weird. Having to unlock two airlocks just to walk through another loading screen is demoralising, and the takeoff and landing portions of space gameplay are non-existent, which create a disconnect from the purpose of having a ship outside of a handful of space combat sections and having another inventory to manage.
You could have argued these parts of this game feel like they might have been held back or at least designed with some consideration for last-gen consoles – but this is a PC and Xbox Series only game. These aren’t problems, but they are unusual choices for a game that was hopefully aiming to be more than ‘Fallout in Space’ and instead be something new.
Regardless of these flaws, underneath everything is a spark. Early on in the game you are struck with the scale and scope of this world, and while a lot of people will rightly point out that large parts of it are empty wasteland – and yes, the game’s planets really beg out for the addition of a small buggy or ATV – but there’s plenty to catch your eye or to make you want to take a look. This game gives a strong first impression but sadly wears on you until you experience a single element long enough to see that a lot of these systems are not that deep, they just feel that way because some of the options are gated off via skill checks.
This leaves this current iteration of Starfield in a strange place. If you’re familiar with a common piece of sports commentary, this game has a high floor, but a low ceiling. It never feels bad or broken, it just feels like it should be better, or feel newer.
I’ve played a lot of games that feature space and exploration, and Starfield’s world is the one that feels the most at home on the ground, but for this to truly capture my imagination, it needed to find a way to take off.
Starfield’s scope will certainly allow some to claim that it has thousands of hours of gameplay, and it’s not incorrect to say it has thousands of different planets – but these claims are the same level of clenched-teeth truth as Day 1 with No Man’s Sky. This is a stronger starting point than that game, and already has more gameplay systems and mechanics. But I’m under no illusion that this game didn’t also make the same mistake of trying to impress with quantity over quality.
The nicest thing I can say here is that this will not be the death of Starfield, and it may even be the catalyst for this to evolve to be the greatest space RPG game that we ever get to play. This game has so much empty right now, that one way or another, via Bethesda themselves or the modding community, this space will get filled.
Personally, I found Starfield fun for around 20-30 hours, and after that I had to push myself onwards to see the story’s ending. I found there was a fatigue that set in with the gameplay, once you’ve tried a bit of everything and realised the limitations, or, like me, realised that this feels like a Fallout game, cosplaying. The costume change didn’t do enough to make this stand out beyond the previous Bethesda titles, and I really struggled to see where the gameplay evolution was.
Some players might be unwilling or unable to push past this, while others will appreciate the consistency. I landed somewhere in the middle and found myself wishing that there was a more meaningful change, as it feels like we now have three IPs that feel and play this exact same way, you just have to pick your favourite flavour. Yet, in many ways I can still see Starfield’s value.
That coincidentally enough, leads me to an easy conclusion. Starfield is undoubtedly the perfect Gamepass game, and while I’m not certain this will get Xbox consoles flying off shelves like it’s the Switch at the start of the pandemic, but there’s enough positivity here that both Bethesda and Microsoft can claim this is a victory. Even the most pessimistic side of me will concede that this experience feels a lot better because I didn’t have to pay full retail for it.
Fatelighter 