There's a reason why humankind has found space travel to be so alluring. It's mysterious, expansive, and comprised of limitless opportunity. Starfield taps into each of those aspects incredibly well. Once you get past the ridiculously complicated and information-heavy tutorial, the game opens up into a loop of players' own imagination rather than a linear highway most are expecting. Starfield changes the RPG game by adding a slow burn of a main quest alongside a character management system that keeps players’ power in check. It’s nearly perfect, and I can’t wait to spend another chunk of my life playing another excellent Bethesda RPG.
It’s been a long Saturday night. I’ve downed multiple cups of coffee and have spent somewhat of eight hours piloting my ship around the universe. Tonight, I was looking for a habitable planet to mine for resources. Upon grav-jumping to a new galaxy, a ship popped up in front of me piloted by an NPC named Grandma. The ship’s comms relay opened:
“Hello, dear! I just made dinner. Why don’t you stop for a spell. Space travel can be lonely!”
I was suspicious. Anyone worth their salt would be wary of strangers rolling up and identifying themselves as a benign, and vulnerable and fragile human. Space pirates are real, and no amount of sleeplessness would convince me into letting down my guard.
“Dinner’s getting cold, dear. Come on over!”
I saved my game. Something seemed…off. Very off. I was intrigued by the ship in front of me, but I didn’t want to miss out on space pirate loot in the off chance it was a pirate lord trying to take over my ship. I caved. I docked with the unknown ship and walked inside.
There was indeed a Grandma sitting there. No, she wasn’t a pirate. No, she wasn’t out to take my ship’s cargo. No, she wasn’t out to kill me. She was literally named Grandma. She acted just like my grandma. If you have (or had) a grandma, she probably was acting like yours, too. This grandma served me shepherd’s pie before seeing me off on my quest to find a livable planet — all in a three-minute moment.
You’ve probably spent way too much time playing Bethesda’s Skyrim or Fallout, meaning you’re familiar with small moments like these. You may have shared a story like this with your friends who also played these games because of how random and unique each playthrough proceeds.
You’ve also probably heard quite a bit (or not enough!) about Starfield over the past few years. It’s Bethesda’s newest title. It’s the first “big” XBOX exclusive. It’s the first non-Elder Scrolls and non-Fallout game from one of the oldest and best RPG developers in the Western hemisphere known for taking incredibly big risks while putting Skyrim on every single technological device in your home. Once again, Bethesda has taken an intergalactic-sized swing and successfully hit a home run…or at least something incredibly close to it. Todd Howard, I know you’ve been wanting to make a space-forward title for years. Let me be the first say that Starfield is a fantastic RPG. It’s an interstellar masterpiece of intergalactic proportions.
Be warned – I’ve taken my punnyness into overdrive for this monstrosity of a review. I was lucky to have the opportunity to review this with our head honcho, Nathan, too! It’s quite fitting for Starfield though – it really is that big. You’re welcome in advance.
Mechanics – Bethesda Classics (Nathan)
Bethesda games in the past were consistent in their mechanic execution. From Morrowind to Fallout 4, picking up a controller for a Bethesda Softworks game meant you knew what you were doing right out of the box because they were almost identical to each other. Movement, weapon swaps, and even jumping mechanics were the same execution on the controller, and it made sense considering the concepts of the games were similar. The common mechanical theme for each of those games was that they were ground-based, meaning you walked everywhere and never really left it, except when jumping, and you used weapons. The basic structure of how the games worked, even when horses or whatever mode of transportation might have cropped up didn’t change much at all from series to series. It was easy, familiar, and expected. With Starfield that muscle memory takes a detour.
Starfield forces you to juggle the gameplay mechanics in a most non-traditional Bethesda Softworks way. As you’ll find out in the next section, you really have to concentrate, memorize controls, find paths to access menus, and test out mechanics on a consistent basis to fully understand and remember how they work; nothing about the process is simple. While the mechanics of your character are still basic, the added elements of a UI that consistently fights for your attention and the introduction of a spaceship, and all those Wing Commander-like mechanics that come with it, tend to add a stutter to the gameplay flow. That stutter is what your brain goes through when trying to remember the path to find a mechanic, menu option, or remember how to fly a dang spaceship. You can feel the delay of getting back to the gameplay throughout, as I did over 24+ hours’ worth of gameplay. That delay pulls you out of the immersion and connection that your brain is trying to engage with the game. It’s akin to writing a review and a small 9-year-old keeps asking you questions about Steven Universe. It’s start, stop, start, stop, and there is no getting used to the inconsistency of brain engagement to the process. The mechanics and mixture of new spaceship mechanics, as well as cluttered UI, make for a frustrating time, though not so overwhelming that you want to abandon the gameplay.
Staying with the UI, to get to the mission menu, I had to hit the start button on the Xbox Series X controller, go into my Starmap (top left), and then press the select button on the controller to access missions. I did this for a full 20 hours, where I had to go 2-3 menus deep to get to my missions. Around the 21st hour, I randomly found by holding the start button on the controller it would take me directly to missions. There is no indication of that on the bottom-right menu, and this was just a singular example of how the UI wasn’t fully worked out.
On the spaceship side of mechanics, as stated above, it was straight out of Wing Commander from the 90s. Getting ships to turn, understanding how to revert power across engines, guns, missiles, shields, and warp drive, was tricky business. Even knowing which weapons you were armed with, because you can acquire a fleet of ships throughout the game (even by illegal means) and they can come in a variety of weapon flavors, took a hot minute to understand. I truly didn’t know the trigger labels for the guns were located on the round targeting HUD until hour 27. It was faint at best, which made it unnoticeable.
The mechanics, while still echoing the ghosts of Bethesda Softworks past, were drowned out by UI and HUD issues. I’m glad that Bethesda Softworks tried something new, and eventually you’ll overcome the spaceship issues, but the UI was a tough one to get used to, especially when the HCI was running low.
Mechanics – Information Overload
The first few hours of Starfield can best be described as information overload on steroids. On top of the new RPG mechanics Bethesda has included to change up the tried-and-true first-person RPG gameplay, ship mechanics were introduced to me right at the start, too. It felt legitimately overwhelming each time I got a new quest because I was worried about what else I would have to learn. I was expected to learn how to manage my ship, manage my crew, manage my new resources, manage weapons, learn about space travel, and figure out my character’s place in Starfield’s world.
If that doesn’t sound like a lot – trust me. It’s going to be. The fact that I was eight hours in and still learning new mechanics with a different UI is an indication that Starfield will be a case study in how to onboard new players AND veteran RPG fans into shifting their expectations about user interfaces, game design, and more. As an ex-Skyrim addict with something like 300 hours over the past decade (not to mention Fallout 3, 4, and New Vegas), I couldn’t help but continue to expect some of the UI to operate like it did in previous titles.
Take the main menu, for example. Gone is the typical horizontal layout that can be navigated via triggers. Instead, you have a circular menu. The “scanner” mode (think Fallout’s Pip-Boy but with less character and lacking a local map) can highlight where to go next on a quest and give players another way of fast traveling without needing to open the main menu. It was a lot to learn and unlearn, and I have concerns about players getting over that learning curve all the while they’re getting their feet wet with the game.
Once you get over that learning curve, though…smooth sailing. Back to our head honcho, Nathan!
Mechanics – Character Building (Nathan)
There is so much here with character building, and I absolutely adore it. In the same vein as Fallout 4, you are asked to pick a character class at the beginning of the adventure. You can pick from classes such as soldier, diplomat, gangster, chef, or even a professor (there are many more but you get the picture). With each character class comes a specific set of expertise traits. I chose a professor because I am one in real life (Hey, Will chiming in – I chose Professor, too!!); with that choice I gained traits such as raised enlightened (get some goodies in the House of the Enlightened), empath (deeply connected to the feelings of others), and a taskmaster trait (good ship self-repair, but crew costs double). There are a lot of classes to choose from and each comes with their own traits, so you’re never short on choices or uniqueness. There is so much room for revisiting the game with a different class and because of that it’s amazingly deep with choice and variety. And that is before we even talked about the upgradable character skills.
The days of skirting lines with forks in the road on skill upgrades, such as heavy armor, dual weapon play, and/or stealth, are long since gone. While Skyrim might have lasted nearly 13 years, how you upgrade characters in a Bethesda Softworks game has now taken a simplified, and somewhat pleasant shift. Starfield brings new ways to upgrade your characters and provides an easier path for those upgrades to happen. The structure of the upgrades is laid out in categories (Physical, Social, Combat, Science, and Tech), and within each category lies specific skills. For example, under Science you could improve your warp jumps by upgrading Astrodynamics, or you could upgrade your piloting skills under Tech, so that you might be able to pilot bigger ships. Regardless, the top-down skills system approach works well within Starfield.
To make the upgrading even deeper, each skill that you upgrade has multiple levels within it that you can unlock to refine and improve those skills. For example, you can rank up four levels with Astrodynamics, which improves warp range and reduces fuel cost in the process. Each category has at least 16 separate skills you can acquire and upgrade, and each skill contains at least four level upgrades. Do the math and see how extensive and complicated, in a good way, that can get real quick. It’s brilliant, easy to understand, and a fantastic motivator to keep exploring and finding more ways to upgrade your character.
Beyond the backend dealings of character building, the front-facing part of your characters life has an insane number of choices to keep you armed and protected. You will find a considerable number of weapons out in the ether, and each one will have certain rolls that go along with your finds. Those rolls could be physical, accuracy, range, and fire rate (also, mass, which we will get to in a second). Your character can also acquire defense items, such as spacesuits, helmets, backpacks, and inner-wear (is that a thing?). Clothing and defense items have measurements such as physical stats, energy, thermal, corrosive, radiation resistance, and even airborne. The outfits are geared towards certain planets and situations, so having a variety and paying attention to their rolls is vital for getting the most out of your character. It’s ridiculous how much thought and detail went into the RPG side of Starfield in the front-facing aspects of character building. There is so much detail to ingest, but none of it feels wasted when you’re trying to create that perfect character that is ready for multiple situations.
While everything might seem hunky-dory with character building, and it is for the most part, let me also add a bit of an irritating downer about character building. Carrying capacity, especially at the start of the game, is a burden to bear. Throughout the worlds of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, having to make item carrying decisions meant delays rather than harmful consequences. And both series gave you some flexibility when it came to what you could collect and how long it would take before you had to make a ‘drop item’ decision. With Starfield, that item dropping decision happens quickly in the game, you’ll see it within the first 1-2 hours, and it won’t let up. You will find a consistent need to jettison items from your character and character’s ship as they become a weight issue that could lead to serious harm. I have spent at least 10% of my time figuring out what I should carry and what I don’t need rather than spending it on exploring the Starfield universe. That doesn’t seem a lot, but take into account I’m nearly 30 hours into the game and I have spent nearly one-third of my time chucking things onto planets across the known universe. I have littered in some many solar systems that I feel ashamed. Anyway, it’s not a gamebreaker by any means, but it’s irritating stopping and going instead of exploring. I’m sure there is something out there that will make the capacity bigger, but I have yet to run into it. I’m holding out hope.
If weapons and armor aren’t weighing you down in the game, the game’s variety of gravity from planet to planet will surely flip-flop that idea of weight. While this isn’t too much about character building, it should be noted how impressive the game is with detailing gravity and what that means to movement. Each planet comes with its own gravity measurement. Sometimes you can jump up real high, especially on moons with no flora/fauna on the surface, and sometimes you’re bolted down with small jumps. Regardless of planet, the very fact that you’ve got a fluctuating variety of gravity with each new planet you adventure on is a ridiculous amount of detail that wasn’t necessary, but it sure is cool. Also, huge side note, since we’re talking about mathematics and Christopher Nolan-like decision-making from Interstellar, sleep times vary in the game. So, if you’re sleeping on an Earth-like planet, time may move 1:1 normally. If you’re sleeping in a bed next to a planet that might be near a star (or something worse), then one hour of sleep might be one day of it. There is an extensive amount of mathematics that went into this game to give some cool, sometimes goofy variety to the gameplay. It’s good to see some deep detail and love was put into it to reinforce that you’re traveling through outer space and not every planet is the same. Again, ridiculously lovely details.
Anyway, back to Will!
Gameplay/Mechanics – Universe
Much of Starfield encourages the player to explore its seemingly endless universe, mostly via grav-jumping on the player’s ship. Sometimes you’ll come across an NPC-controlled ship just like I described as you’re in orbit of the planet. Othertimes you’ll touch down on a new planet and discover a seemingly empty facility that’s crawling with poisonous crabs or renegade robots. Maybe you’ll start off looking to scan a planet’s flora and fauna and end up being delighted by something completely unexpected. Starfield has rewarded my drive to explore with so much – I can’t wait to return and see what else I find.
Planetary travel is less straightforward than you think. Some planets have quest-specific destinations, like the cities of New Atlantis and Neon. You can freely travel to and from these cities with no issue, but you can’t always get outside of the city walls. This is primarily because landing on non-named portions of planet automatically generates a cell, if you will, of terrain, resources, and enemies that you can explore to your heart’s content. You won’t be able to walk around the entirety of the planet, per se, but you can walk pretty far from your chosen landing site. This also means that landing near a named location like New Atlantis will mean that the city doesn’t show up at all because the game treats these named locations as discrete and contained entities. I tested this out by selecting a landing spot just next to New Atlantis…and I couldn’t see its massive buildings and greenery once I touched down. Nothing. It was as though the city didn’t exist despite being a few meters away from where it should be.
Whether this is a technological limitation, strategic decision, or simple oversight is up for debate. The immersion is broken when I expect to see a Starfield landmark in all of its futuristic glory just absent from the world. Seeing landmarks serves a functional purpose, too. Think back to your Skyrim experience, assuming you played Skyrim. Imagine making your way through the frigid north on your way to Winterhold or Solitude. Outside of the city walls, the world is dangerous; seeing the massive castles behind the city walls gives the player a reminder of the safe haven that exists and a notion of warmth looking forward. In Starfield‘s case, you could argue that you really have little reason to venture outside of the larger cities seeing as you have a ship that’s miles more efficient and powerful than the Dragonborn’s horse, but the fact remains that it would have been nice for logic to be applied to the planets’ cell generation when applicable.
There are more unique locations to visit outside of New Atlantis and Neon, however, and some of these unnamed cities are just as big and multitiered. Faction quests took me across multiple galaxies, flagging massive population hubs containing even more quests that began to pile up in my missions tab. It was slightly overwhelming at first because of how quickly I was visiting planets on a single mission. For Outer Worlds fans, you’ll be treated to reminders of Groundbreaker, Edgewater, and Stellar Bay in all but name, but much livelier and fuller of secrets. Upon visiting these hubs for the first time, you’ll also be overwhelmed by the sheer number of PEOPLE meandering and going about their daily lives. Bethesda has done some stellar work in the past in creating seemingly living cities full of NPCs that follow specific schedules on a daily basis. Here, they’ve amped it to 11 in the quantity AND quality department. NPCs are just about everywhere, having smalltalk, walking wherever they want, and utilizing the cities’ elements like public transport, benches, and ledges. Despite most of the NPCs being generic and uninteractable, seeing everything so alive and functional felt really good to experience.
Once you pick out who the “real” NPCs are and who the “fluff” are, you’ll feel much more connected to the game. You’ll also start to notice small details about the NPCs, too. Very early on, I was pleasantly surprised by the vast differences in the NPCs’ features, even down to things like freckles, vitiligo, and forehead wrinkles. Speaking to major NPCs revealed even more facial features and emotive responses that mirrored what was being said in dialogue. Instead of the typical uncanny valley of NPC responses looking disconnected from their faces, things were…consistent. Human. Emotive. Other NPCs would occasionally recognize my existence before returning to their cycles. I walked past a security guard in a city, and the guard commented on how I was “doing good” for the United Colonies and gave me 2,000 credits. All of this happened while I was walking past them – I wasn’t even stopped! I walked past a group of citizens, and a “rumor” quest popped up in my inventory. This happened so many times I lost count. And I loved it because I was never bogged down while on the way to completing a quest.
Story/Quest Choices – Focus on the Main Quest First
The game almost punishes you for staying off the main quest, which is quite unexpected compared to Bethesda’s predecessors. Experience from faction and side quests are doled out bit by bit, whereas the main quests grant tons of experience. On top of that, playing the main quest unlocks quite a bit of the universe and other mechanics that would have been otherwise missed if you had spent your time solely on side quests. If anything, Starfield will teach you to complete the main quest first so you can get involved with the rest of its universe with a greater set of tools at your disposal.
Back when I played Skyrim for the very first time, I spent a good 50 hours avoiding the main quest and just completing small odds and ends for the sake of completing side quests and the like. Yes, dear reader, I did not encounter a Skyrim dragon until nearly 50 hours in after I wondered aloud as to when (and where) I would encounter dragons. Since I opted into focusing on Starfield‘s main quest, I had a much different experience in growing stronger and seeing the world open up as I acquired power. Starfield‘s formidable foes emerge much later into its main quest rather than in a few steps in, but they arrive at the first pinnacle moment where your choices dictate your future. These foes are significantly formidable; like Skyrim, they can appear at any time, be it in space or on a planet. Unlike Skyrim, though, these foes surprise you and have a much deeper role in Starfield‘s main quest.
I’m opting to avoid spoiling as much of Starfield‘s story as possible simply because of how it delightfully bumped up its difficulty beyond the tried-and-true Bethesda method of pitting players against appropriately leveled enemies. The foes that emerge from its main quest become a literal threat to my crew and I was completing other quests and simply jumping between galaxies. This is how a living RPG should operate, especially in a world of intergalactic scale that Starfield tries to be. Existential threats should emerge when the player least expects them to remind them of their involvement in affairs spanning beyond their existence. These threats should keep players on their toes despite their constant path of growing stronger, acquiring more powerful weaponry, and bringing on powerful allies to assist in the hero(ine)’s journey.
Truth be told I wasn’t fully on board with the writing, dialogue, and small lore tidbits of Starfield‘s universe at first. Sure, space-forward tales are less of my cup of tea and more of a snack I prefer to consume in small doses; I will admit my personal bias. I spent much of my first 12 hours skimming documents and speedreading through dialogue because I wanted to do things rather than learn and live through things. Then, the consequences of my actions emerged to remind me of my decisions in-game and who I chose to lead. The nature of the story took an unexpectedly surprising turn that breathed humanity into the members of my crew who I had assumed were simply there to shoot enemies and operate my ship as I explored the galaxy and beyond. Tender emotions emanated from the story beats and reminded me of some of the darker periods of my life thanks to the emotionally accurate, vivid, and detailed conversations my character had with my crew. For comparison’s sake, the emotions I experienced during these little moments were equivalent to those I felt when playing The Last of Us II for the first time.
Once you get through most of the main quest, you’ll see why I have such strong feelings about Starfield’s story. It hits home in ways most science fiction tales fail to hit because they’re too wrapped up in making the universe realistic and realized rather than its characters a reflection of those reading (or in this case, playing). It made me make multiple decisions with no “winning outcomes.”
This is just the main quest, mind you. I’ve spent over 30 hours playing the main quest and ignoring the faction quests. Like other Bethesda titles, Starfield’s factions feel like discrete organizations operating with their own self-interests but converge at different points to give players a side to take. Starfield has much more variance, though. Nathan and I started the same faction quest in a vastly different fashion, so expect to have a unique experience compared to your friends.
Starfield contains the typical silly quest and Easter egg just like Bethesda’s older titles. The experience with Grandma is the tip of the iceberg as to what to expect from the likes of Starfield, but it takes a minute. Actually, it takes quite a long time to start to notice those small details. Once you do, you’ll start appreciating quite a bit of the genius in the details tucked away in its galaxies. You’ll have even more to share around the campfire/water cooler.
Starfield’s Stability
Starfield is the best running Bethesda RPG we’ve played…well, ever. On the XB version, we encountered no crashes over 30-40 hours of play.
For the sake of science, I tested out Starfield on a PC with a 2070 SUPER GPU and a fourth generation i5 CPU. I played Starfield for over 32 hours on this rig, too. You’re probably noticing that my CPU is well below the minimum sixth generation i7. It runs moderately well even on the almost nine-year-old CPU. Of course, my game stuttered and occasionally froze up for a second or two when I was fighting enemy ships and/or in battle against a large group of enemies with particles flying every which way. But other than that, it crashed exactly once on PC. Once!
The fact that it runs so well on a CPU under the minimum and near perfectly on console speaks volumes about the amount of work Bethesda has done to make Starfield a visual and technological RPG indicative of being a “next-gen” RPG.
Final Thoughts
We’re just about three years into the current “next gen” of consoles. Starfield is an XBOX exclusive. You’ve probably heard Phil Spencer’s Kinda Funny Xcast interview where he argues that Microsoft just needs to make games rather than attempt to make great games and how “there’s no world where Starfield is an 11/10 and people start selling their PS5s.” I’m not going to sit here and make any facetious, over-hyped, and clickbaity nonsense telling a PS5 owner to drop everything and get a Series S|X just play Starfield. I cannot, in good faith, tell an XBOX owner that the wait has been totally worth it and this is XBOX’s game of the generation or even of the year.
But, uh…if you’re an XBOX owner…you should definitely play this game. If you’re a Game Pass owner, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give Starfield a chance this September. If you’re a PC player without Game Pass, then Starfield is without a doubt going to be a game you’ll play, and possibly replay, for hundreds of hours to come. Maybe in a few years, we’ll see Starfield on Amazon’s Alexa. Or Siri. Or Google Assistant.
What about PS5 owners, then? How should you consider Starfield if you lack a PC to play it while owning a massive library of already-fantastic games that are just as worthy of your time? To you I say – maybe you should wait. Maybe. As much as I love this game and can see myself investing a good month’s worth of time messing around with its variance just to see what happens, some PS5 owners may feel let down by Starfield’s attempt at creating an immersive RPG that takes advantage of the hardware in players’ hands, not just in the rig that powers the game.
I would be lying if I said that I wished that Starfield remained an XBOX console exclusive, though. I use my DualSense controller when I play most PC games, and Starfield was no exception. You’re welcome to mock me for preferring a controller – go ahead. I’ve grown up with Nintendo and Sony controllers in my hands rather than using a mouse and keyboard to play games. I’ve branched out a bit, over the past few years, but I still prefer the feel of a controller in my hand so I can sit back on my couch or in my chair and just play. Since picking up a PS5 on Day 1, I’ve become quite spoiled by the DualSense’s adaptive triggers, haptics, and sound effects. Sure, they’re niche and fluff, but the small details add quite the nice touch. In game, I couldn’t help but wish that my controller rumbled when using my Cutter to mine minerals and when my ship took off/landed. I missed it.
I loved playing Starfield. Nathan did, too. We’ve both invested over 30 hours apiece and had vastly different gameplay experiences, but we agree on one major issue with Bethesda’s newest RPG: It takes way too long to appreciate the small moments of Starfield’s grandiosity. The fact that I was well over 12 hours in before I found some form of intergalactic rhythm that wasn’t tied to a tutorial is a significant issue. Players shouldn’t be subjected to a litany of information and mechanics in this fashion. I am genuinely concerned that players won’t appreciate this game because of the investment required in order for things to go from good to outstanding. Yes, Starfield becomes outstanding. It just takes a while.
There’s a reason why humankind has found space travel to be so alluring. It’s mysterious, expansive, and comprised of limitless opportunity. Starfield taps into each of those aspects incredibly well. Once you get past the ridiculously complicated and information-heavy tutorial, the game opens up into a loop of players’ own imagination rather than a linear highway most are expecting. Starfield changes the RPG game by adding a slow burn of a main quest alongside a character management system that keeps players’ power in check. It’s nearly perfect, and I can’t wait to spend another chunk of my life playing another excellent Bethesda RPG.
A review copy of Starfield was provided by the publisher for the sole purpose of this DigitalChumps review.
