Starfield

Starfield is a big game. It’s a good game, too. But it’s a big, good game with issues. And while I generally don’t like to focus on the negatives in games that I’ve enjoyed, I’m afraid in this case I have make an exception, because as great as Starfield is, it’s an experience that’s defined by its restraints and limitations.

See that moon? You can travel there! Just hit the button and you’ll arrive. No need to pilot through space, no need to practice landing. Just click and go. (If only travel on our planet were so convenient – lord knows I’d love for my next trans-Pacific flight to be over in blink.)

And once you’re there? Well, odds are another space ship will fly overhead and land somewhere nearby. It’s almost inevitable. You can moon walk for five minutes to go see if it’s a friendly ship or a pirate one. Or you can walk five minutes in another direction to go witness a special geological formation that’s has randomly formed among the desolate craters. If this actually sounds kind of cool, that’s because it is – the first five or six times, at least. But soon you’ll come to realize how similar all these moons and planets are to one another, and how painstaking it is to traverse across them just to check off some boxes on the planetary survey checklist.

So it goes for combat. I actually enjoy the gunplay quite a bit, but most enemies are either robots or men in spacesuits, and if you play for any length of time you’ll begin to notice the repetitive environments. It’s not just the textures – entire caves and moon bases will reappear, carbon copied from ones you’ve seen previously. I was happy to suspend my disbelief as I jetpacked around and blasted a few bad dudes, but the déjà vu was unsettling just the same.

Ambition is what sets Starfield apart, but it’s also its downfall. Making a game this big and filling it with interesting stuff would literally be impossible. Even if Bethesda had kept the game in the oven for a decade or two, it would still feel incomplete. While I appreciate the ambition, I can’t help but feel that Starfield would be better if Bethesda had focused more on less. Fewer planets with more density; less open space, more cities. Surely there are billions of people in this galaxy? Where do they all live? (On the bright side, there’s plenty of opportunity for Bethesda to offer DLC that adds depth to spaces that are currently empty.)

Yet despite all these grumbles, I did enjoy Starfield. The gunplay is fun, and I’m actually quite impressed by the skill tree. There are so many interesting skills, and every time I leveled up I felt like I had a tough choice to make. And empty as the moonscapes may be, there is something cool about climbing up a lunar mountain and seeing another moon hanging in the sky above. The majesty is real. Bethesda shot for the stars, and though they didn’t quite hit their target, they still landed in a great spot.

Bethesda Game Studios have made many of my favorite games so naturally Starfield was one of my most anticipated titles, perhaps the most I've been hyped in recent years for one. The scope of the game was a little unreal with 1000 planets to explore, big cities, space combat, resource scanning and gathering, outpost building and that's just to name a few. The studio have always made the biggest RPGs, and they just continue to expand their scope even more. Space was the next logical place to go and I think overall they have succeeded at making this grandiose space adventure like only they could have done it.

Shortly after booting up the game and passing the intro story, you quickly realize just how massive the game is. Not only you can choose to go to any of the planets on the system, but you can also move from system to system and choose planets and moons to land on. This is a pretty overwhelming feeling as this does not even count all the quests you are finding in the main city New Atlantis, you are suddenly given the option of doing like 15 different things and without really any priority to them except for the main quest. That's one of the best aspects of the game is just the ultimate freedom of going where you want and doing the things that you feel like doing at the moment. Like you can just do questing and acquire some sweet loot in the process, or just go on scanning planets and discovering their wildlife and resources. There is a lot to do in Starfield, and you'll never really run out of things to do as long as your are enjoying yourself.

The skilltree is pretty interesting as pretty much all of the skills are very useful and you will want to have them all, but you can only assign 1 per point per level so you will have to make some pretty key decisions into which directions you are dedicated yourself to. You won't be able to have them all, so these decisions are highly important. Although I do miss the "do activity more to up its level" of the Elder Scrolls series, I do think they have incorporated the aspect here as you'll need to do stuff before you put additional points in the same skill. Research Lab allows for better crafting items and gear mods, but this requires to find resources all over the world in order to unlock those things. So a lot of the stuff you are looting will come in useful for that, but perhaps the random junk items are a little stepback from Fallout 4 as you can't really recycle junk into parts for other usage.

The questlines in the game are generally very good. From the main quest and the 4 faction quests, they do pack a lot of surprises that will get you traveling across the map in order to complete their steps. They also involve decision making as going a certain path will have deep impact on the rest of the quests. Some of the more minor quests are quite good too, and there's just so many of them that you'll often just pick a random one and getting into its story all while discovering new planets and systems. It's a great feeling to have your character progress by leveling up, acquiring new gear, getting stronger and also improving (or buying) new spaceships... like this large RPG feeling that's kind of like a single player MMO, you are building for the long run instead of a tight linear adventure.

One thing that the game improves over the Fallout games is the gunplay. Fallout was never one of the best shooters as it wasn't really focused on being just that, but in Starfield you really have some good shooting and with tons of guns to choose from. And there's lots of it, whenever you go down on a planet for some mission, like 95% of the time you'll end up shooting people or weird creatures. And kind of like in a looter shooter loop, you'll pick up new ones and toss away the trashy ones (every enemy you kill you can grab the gun they were using) so it's really a fun aspect if you enjoy gear sorting like that. The shooting just feels very good and it's perhaps not top of the line like Destiny or Wolfenstein, but it's definitely really satisfying nevertheless.

The game does have its flaws too and for me the 2 main things that stuck out was the ship combat that felt a little mediocre. Having recently played Everspace 2, it really feels like several steps behind that game in that aspect and it's generally the type of mission that I was trying to avoid since I didn't enjoy those very much... not sure how it could have been done better, but I felt my options always limited of trying to blow up the others before being blown up without really much choices both offensively and defensively. Only time when it got good is when I got an amazing ship and was just blowing up everything in sight easily. The other main aspect is when going for anomalies on barren planets and you have to walk 1000 meters of nothing to get to the other objective, it feels pretty tedious with not much interesting about it. This is usually a required step to get the special powers, and well it's not very fun so I just ended up skipping most of them.

There's probably a ton more things to talk about in Starfield, the game is just so massive that there's probably much I haven't seen yet. I have completed the main quest after roughly 60 hours of playing and I have just started to new game+ loop for even more adventures. In a way there is nothing that Starfield is the absolute best at, and people can easily pinpoint a long list of games where the individual stuff is better in those games. And that's absolutely true, Starfield is a little bit of a jack of all trades and master of none type game. However having all of those things combined together and set into the grandest scope of them all is what makes Starfield so special, there is simply no other game where you can do as many things together and have all these systems interconnected for a grand experience. I have been playing only Starfield for the past 14 days, and every night I keep getting excited about going more into it. I am perhaps a little bit more fond of Oblivion and Skyrim (which are really some of my absolute all-time favorites), but the Starfield experience is really something unique and also among my favorite gaming moments ever, Bethesda have done it again and then some.