STARFIELD REVIEW

“One does not approach the afterlife with such trepidation.”

Written by James Jensen

30 October 2023

Starfield, Bethesda Game Studio’s first new IP in almost three decades, is a game that is marred by expectation. Announced all the way back in 2018, speculation immediately began on exactly what Starfield would be. There was little doubt that it would be a massive, sprawling RPG, but how exactly Bethesda would bring their tried and tested formula into the modern era was yet to be seen.

Starfield was somewhat challenging to pin down pre launch. It was clear that it would be an RPG like most Bethesda games prior, but it also had this vague aura of mystery surrounding it in regards to what exactly the player would be able to do. Todd Howard then announced that the game would contain over 100 star systems, and over 1000 planets, “all open for you to explore,” and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t incredibly concerned.   

Let’s cut to the chase. Is Starfield a good game? 

Yes, it absolutely is. However, to some degree Bethesda’s reputation, and their commitment to outdated design principles contribute a lot to obscuring just why this is.

Starfield begins; its narrative shrouded in mystery. You, a deep space mining contractor, are tasked with recovering an object of unknown origin from a mine site in a far off system. Upon retrieval of said artifact, you are rendered unconscious and met with visual and auditory hallucinations, which you will soon learn are part of a larger mystery the game will spin. Awoken by your co-workers some time later, the mine site is attacked by the Crimson Fleet, Starfield’s band of space pirates, and in an effort to escape, you are tasked with delivering the artifact to an organisation known as Constellation, a ragtag group of scientists and explorers with the esteemed goal of discovering the secrets of the universe.

What follows, while quite slow to start, is a compelling and intriguing story following Constellation’s plight to retrieve all of the artifacts across the settled systems, and discover the true meaning behind them. While there are some flashy set piece encounters along the main questline, I think the most compelling aspect of Starfield's story is its characters. Constellation is rather eclectic in its composition, with not only Scientists but retired military, Industrialist investors and the blunt but compassionate robot companion VASCO, and genuinely ends up feeling like a tight-knit group by the conclusion of the game. My favourite of this crew by far ended up being Barrett, the intelligent, loudmouth, risk taking scientist, who slowly opens up about his troubled past over the course of the game.

In typical Bethesda fashion, there are four companion characters that can accompany you across your journey, Barrett being one, each boasting a surprisingly in-depth and lengthy questline regarding past struggles and overcoming trauma. There is a fair amount of variety in these questlines, with each character sending you to different parts of the galaxy in order to assist them in their endeavours. Sarah Morgan, Constellation’s leader, has a particularly interesting story about her time as a navigator in the game’s historic conflict, “The Colony War.”

What I enjoyed most about Starfield was its commitment to world building, really rewarding players that put in the time to understand its universe through not just voice logs and terminal entries, but through actual locations that feel realised enough to actually exist. The year is 2330, and a catastrophe has since left Earth uninhabitable, forcing humanity to find refuge amongst the stars, made possible through the invention of faster-than-light travel. The game’s major city, New Atlantis in Alpha Centauri has an in-game museum dedicated to explaining humanity’s expansion, often through the typical one-sided lens that these displays tend to have. New Atlantis contains Embassies for the game’s major factions, shopping and residential districts, the slum-like Well and Constellation’s home base, and genuinely has a sense of place, and is a massive step up from Bethesda’s previous major settlements.

“Catastrophe has since left Earth uninhabitable, forcing humanity to seek refuge among the stars.

Other areas include Akila City, the capital of the Freestar Collective, Starfield’s yee-haw libertarian confederation, which contrasts heavily to the United Colonies, which much more closely mimics what one would expect from an interstellar government. The most interesting in my opinion was Neon, a considerably more lawless pleasure city built on a fishing rig, where mega-corporations and smugglers co-exist, looking to circumvent the rules and regulations of the United Colonies. These places feel not only inhabited, but the focus that Bethesda has placed on realistic depictions of industry does a lot to make them feel more believable. Spaceship manufacturers, shady corporations, and large-scale mining operations all exist in a somewhat realistic fashion, as well as space-pirate brigands, mercenaries, treasure collectors and religious groups. A lot of work has clearly been put into making this world as believable as possible, and hats off to Bethesda’s writers for pulling it off. 

Each faction has an accompanying quest-line, and while Starfield’s main narrative is definitely worth experiencing, a lot of its side content is just as interesting if not better than the main quest. Neon’s Ryujin Industries has a particularly fun group of quests, seeing you climb the corporate ladder, going from delivering coffee to an executive meeting to enacting full scale corporate espionage, with the typical tongue-in-cheek humour you would expect from a premise so absurd. What feels essential however is the UC Vanguard questline, following the sudden outbreak of an alien superpredator, and a group of scientists doing whatever necessary to save humanity. The work put into a lot of these quests means they often don’t really feel like side content, but a major gripe I have with their implementation is that their outcomes unfortunately don’t affect the main plot in any way. These quests feel deep and intriguing, placing you in a lot of morally grey situations and asking you to make some tough decisions, but ultimately are inconsequential due to their lack of impact on the story. 

And this is what leads into one of Starfield’s biggest problems. While quests individually feel quite well written and structured, they often feel disjointed when it comes to the context of the game as a whole. Where something like The Witcher 3 had side quests that in the moment could feel rather insignificant to the main plot, would often recontextualise themselves in interesting ways later on, not just affecting the main story but doing so in ways you often might not expect, Starfield just never does this. The Freestar Collective questline is its own thing. The UC Vanguard questline is its own thing. While they may be compelling in their own right, outside of a few comments from certain civilian NPCs they have almost no impact on the world at large, and for an RPG of this type, leaves the world feeling quite unreactive and static, and Starfield feeling quite dated in comparison to other offerings from the genre. Your alignments to certain factions also go unrecognised, with certain positions you can occupy feeling fundamentally opposed to others, and characters seemingly ignoring this fact.

Another major issue is the game's heavy reliance on outdated design principles, making it feel quite old. And I don’t mean old in the retro sense, I mean old as in Starfield feels like it could have been released 10 years ago. It puts the whole “Skyrim in Space,” comparison in a new light.

“Bethesda games,” and this game by proxy have always had this problem with absolutely shocking UI and inventory management systems, asking you to navigate through 4 different menus in order to find some poorly labelled item to cure an illness of unknown origin. So many times when exploring a planet I would be given some random negative status effect, and have to shuffle through my 150 different healing items in order to find the one to fix this extremely specific condition. This is not just a problem with healing items mind you. The game doesn’t tell you how much ammo you have for specific weapons when hovering over them, meaning you either need to equip them, pull them out only to find that you have no bullets, go back into the menu and equip another weapon, or check what ammo type the weapon takes, go into another menu to see how many bullets you have out of more than 20 different ammo types, and then go back into your weapons menu to select a gun that you may not even have ammo for because it is so unclear. Maybe I’m just stupid, but to me this inventory system is absolutely nonsensical, and it is a real shame that Bethesda has made almost no meaningful updates to it since Skyrim. 

The rest of Starfield’s UI is just as bad as its inventory. Clunky menu navigation is required for practically everything. Selecting quests, fast travel, upgrading skills, looking at your ships and crew members, everything revolves around this poorly laid out and unclear menu, which might be fine if you weren’t asked to interact with it so often. Don’t even get me started about the ship builder, which feels like it was tailor made just to piss off anyone brave enough to attempt it.  Where this is most problematic is when we start talking about space travel. In a game so heavily marketed as being about exploring the stars, there is little time spent piloting your ship outside of some competent but unremarkable ship combat. Don’t think that you will be able to fly to a planet in Starfield. Travel around the galaxy involves, you guessed it, going into a menu, clicking on a planet, clicking fast travel, waiting for a loading screen, going back into the menu, clicking on the same planet again, clicking fast travel, waiting for another loading screen, waiting for a landing animation, exiting your ship, waiting for another loading screen, you get the idea. While I understand why it is like this, oftentimes it feels as if the “space exploration” fantasy really works against Starfield, as its overreliance on menus does little other than break immersion. 

Poor design aside, one area where Starfield excels is its implementation of certain RPG systems into its gameplay, particularly pertaining to dialogue. Certain skills or traits that you can spec into can have genuine and sometimes unexpected outcomes when it comes to character interactions, and with Starfield’s persuasion dialogue system, certain skills actually feel quite useful, allowing you to barter or appeal to certain characters' specific traits. Starfield, like any other Bethesda RPG, is primarily a game about conversation, and I’m happy to say that it definitely succeeds on this front, with buildcraft definitely affecting certain outcomes and how you are able to approach situations. Your equipped gear also has some bearing on this, and I found myself frequently swapping kit out based on how I wanted to approach certain situations. Social skills also can have some effect on combat, but their clumsy implementation often made them quite bothersome to execute, so I mostly avoided it.

Speaking of combat, I’m happy to say that things are mostly pretty good here. Guns feel meaningfully varied, each allowing for a unique playstyle, and the implementation of a jetpack really incentivises the player to push forward, leaving combat feeling fresh and interesting. Whilst not mechanically deep or particularly flexible, the gunplay is definitely serviceable, but is clearly not the focus. Weapon skills are mostly limited to simple stat increases, and whilst there is the potential for stealth, enemy pathing and sightlines were clearly not designed for it outside of a select few missions. Combat encounters with human enemies can end up feeling quite samey by the end of the game, but there is some variety in enemy design with some alien creatures. A particularly memorable combat scenario saw me swarmed by alien bugs in an underground prison, and while these are few and far between, it is still a standout.

Space combat is a little more complex, allowing you to pilot your ship in dogfights, managing resources and maintaining appropriate positioning versus your enemies. There are many more skills to spec into in this regard, and it’s clear that Bethesda thought this was a highlight of the game. Whilst initially interesting, the limitations of this system are clear, and unfortunately every combat encounter ends up feeling quite similar by the end of the game: destroy your enemies shield with a laser weapon, and fire missiles to finish them off. Your crewmates and their stats supposedly have some impact on your ship’s combat capabilities, but outside of minor damage increases, the differences seem so inconsequential that you probably won’t spend time optimising your crew for combat. It’s definitely serviceable but nothing here is outstanding.

One of Starfield’s major systems involves the exploration of the galaxy at large. You can warp to any star in the galaxy, land on any planet and explore a procedurally generated map, some with abandoned outposts, mining camps and the like, some with alien life, hostile or otherwise, and some, well most, with nothing at all. I must ask, what is the purpose of a vast universe to explore if there is nothing interesting to do in it? And herein lies the fundamental issue with Starfield and its design. 

A bit of the “Bethesda magic” is lost in its relentless chase of scale, and don’t get me wrong, the scale is impressive, but much of what makes games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 so beloved are those quiet, unexpected moments when travelling between major settlements. Running into a Brotherhood of Steel patrol in the New England wilderness and exchanging a few words, moments like these mean something in a Bethesda game. These unfortunately just don’t exist here, replaced instead by barren, empty landscapes that feel so pointless to move through outside of farming crafting resources, laid in between fast travel and loading screens. There is no sense of discovery, no sense of “just what will I find on the other side of this mountain?” Almost 100% of the time, the answer will be nothing, and when it isn’t nothing, finding the same copy-paste mining camp you have seen 10 times before is seldom worth the effort to go and investigate anyway.

“Moments like these mean something in a Bethesda game. These unfortunately don’t exist here…”

It is worse still when this pervasive design leeches into the otherwise excellent main quest, forcing you to land on otherwise barren planets to collect Skyrim-style spells, which never really gelled with the rest of the game thematically in my opinion, and often was more of a nuisance than it was worth. There are 24 of these to collect, meaning there are 24 instances in which you must go to uninhabited planet X and walk for 2 minutes to a building, fly around for a minute, and then leave. Every single one of these detours I found disinteresting, apart from one related to a companion quest near the end of my 50 hour playthrough, which offered some really heartfelt dialogue that spoke truly to the themes of the narrative. It’s a shame there wasn’t more of this. 

Another star of the show (pun-intended) is presentation. This is another aspect of Starfield that is quite remarkable. Spaces in the game have this retro-future aesthetic Bethesda describes as “NASA-punk,” and, while maybe a little corny, accurately gives an idea for the kind of architecture and design you’ll be seeing in most cases. I think the art does a lot to make Starfield’s more futuristic elements, being space travel and laser weapons, feel much more grounded overall. Highly detailed gauges and dials clutter your cockpit, leaning more into the idea of what space travel might ACTUALLY look like rather than opting for a totally futuristic pallet. Cities are gorgeously detailed and well realised, with a good amount of thought going into how people will actually live and function in these spaces, like the oil-rig inspired Neon or the underbelly of New Atlantis. 

This also extends to many of Starfield’s secondary planets, many doubling as vessels that echo the game’s themes, Red Mile and Paradiso both springing to mind, both of these housing interesting yet uneventful side-quests. The sheer scale and variety on display here is a triumph. If more of Bethesda’s spaces were intentionally crafted like this, the game would feel much less disjointed overall, yet the “1000” planets paradigm still persists. 

One area where the game has received criticism is its facial animations, and for a game that relies heavily on close ups of people’s faces during conversation, I have to say I don’t really agree with a lot of the negative sentiment here. Character models, particularly those in Constellation look great, and while Bethesda won’t win any awards here for best in class facial animations, they are certainly serviceable and unequivocally a huge step up from Bethesda’s previous offerings.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I think as a complete package, Starfield definitely has something to offer. Replayability through an interesting New Game Plus mode, some seriously good storytelling, and a vast amount of side-content, there is definitely a lot here. This begs the question: even with swaths of content, a great narrative and impressive presentation, is Starfield worth your time? Any other year, I would have said unequivocally yes. This is not just any other year, however. This is 2023, a year chock full of banger releases, genre defining masterpieces seemingly every other month, and with so many incredible options vying for your time and attention, I’m not sure Starfield does enough to stand out. While I certainly enjoyed my time with it, I definitely won’t be coming back, as system level frustrations really ground my gears, despite some quality writing and workable combat. 

Does Starfield redeem Bethesda from the atrocity that was Fallout 76? Maybe? It’s a hard question to answer, especially due to its reliance on some seriously old design principles, with an inventory system straight out of 2011, clunky UI and heavy, unavoidable use of fast travel. Despite these flaws, the Settled Systems still feels like one of the most well realised game worlds in recent memory, with the typical Bethesda commitment to lore and world building. It’s a shame then that Starfield tries to do, and be, more than the game’s systems can reasonably handle, taking some truly great moments and sullying them with frustrating design. There are some good ideas here, but even though I enjoyed Starfield, it ultimately fails to sufficiently modernise the Bethesda formula, and thus, I cannot recommend it. 

Starfield, while boasting an intriguing world and narrative, and functional combat and RPG systems, is weighed down by seriously outdated design principles, an overreliance on clunky UI. This is a Bethesda game, for better or for worse, and ultimately feels quite uncontemporary. There is plenty to enjoy here, but there is little to tie it together into something cohesive.