Starfield Review

Written: 02-12-2023

Although I mostly enjoyed Starfield, It has some glaring issues and some big areas for improvement. The scope of the game is incredible at first but then you realise it isn’t quite as big as it presents itself. The quests seem to have more depth than recent Bethesda games but then you realise that although the quest stories are better they often end up being fetch quests. There is incredible detail in some areas of the game while others look wonky and low fidelity.

One thing that blew me away with Starfield was the interior environments. There is so much detail, each individual thing you expect to find on an office desk is there and you can pick them up, throw them around, stick them in your ship and even interact with them in zero gravity. This element of the game was done perfectly, which is why the cities and exteriors can feel a little disappointing as they lack the detail of the interior areas.

Moving to Starfield after playing previous Bethesda games also felt great from a combat perspective. There’s a great variety in weapons, which all feel and look great. The boost pack is also great to use in combat adding another layer to movement, make sure to get the skill for this early. Unfortunately, like with the boost pack skill there are a number of skills that make combat much smoother that you don’t get to begin with. To even get the ability to sneak you need to use a skill point, to slide while in combat you need to use a skill point and some of these I missed until quite late in the game. Although this wasn’t a major issue for me as the combat becomes very easy as you progress. To begin with combat feels more tense as you have limited ammo and med packs and the enemies can damage you but as the game progresses all these elements slowly disappear. The lack of good enemy AI also means that enemies stop posing a threat earlier than they really should.

Quest dialogue has been improved with more options than recent Bethesda games that feel more worthwhile. The option to go with a non-voiced main character really allows you to roleplay whoever you want to be which I enjoy for this sort of game and was an improvement on Fallout 4. However sometimes it can be hard to understand the intended tone of a dialogue option resulting in an unexpected response from an NPC. Dialogue options feel like they can change outcomes in some quests but many of them are mostly still very linear. It also feels like dialogue has been used as a crutch in some areas which were lacking in gameplay as many quests just end up being fetch quests with good writing.

Customisation in Starfield is a lot of fun. You can mod weapons and armour, build and modify spaceships and build entire outposts or just decorate an apartment. These things give the player plenty of options but none of them are required making them a fun option for people who like these elements in games. My biggest issue with these systems is they seem to lack value though. The only reason to invest in outposts is to get more resources to make more outposts. It is easy to find better weapons and armour than you would by making mods most of the time and it takes a long time to progress the skills to do good mods. Furthermore, you don’t get to keep mods after you remove them so you waste the resources you invested if you change mods. Spaceship customisation was probably the best element of player creativity as it was directly useful and your spaceship is a big part of the game.

Spaceships feel great to fly in space and the dogfights can be a lot of fun. I’ve tried playing some other games with space combat like Star Wars: Squadrons and Elite: Dangerous but never found myself really getting into them. Unfortunately travelling between planets can be a little boring and comes down to you clicking through menus. This isn’t so bad to begin with but with how often you do it and the amount of time it takes with little substance it does wear your enjoyment of the game down. Many people have complained about not being able to travel between planets in your ship in real time. Personally, I don’t think this is a major issue as it would take a long time and be quite boring, but a more in depth travel system could allow for more of the interesting random encounters you get in space. I did one great one where you encounter a rogue AI and there have been plenty of others along the way too. One way to do this might be to set a course with your ship, after which you can get up and walk around your ship which could be expanded to have some more activities to do. Then you could get pulled out of your grav jump for random encounters or hazardous situations. Overall the travelling system is serviceable and does what it needs to but it does feel like you get bogged down in menus sometimes.

Speaking of menus, they could do with some improvement. Bethesda has tried to go for a very clean look with the menus which has reduced their usefulness. It would be great if the menus had all the basic stats for the item to the right of the name and then allowed you to sort based on each of the stats. Some of the item categorisation could also be a bit more intuitive. Furthermore, it would be great if we could use items that we find in the world with a use button in addition to the take button as this would reduce the need to open menus so often. There are also a few minor things like how long it takes to pick up an item outside of your menus to move it around in the world. If you are decorating your ship this can be incredibly frustrating in addition to the fact that every time I modify my ship all the items I have placed get thrown into my cargo hold. Furthermore, the on planet map that you can open is completely useless, it doesn’t show you any terrain features so is practically no use when navigating inside or outside. This is a major step down from previous Bethesda games. There are a lot of features in the menus that aren’t really explained and I ended up needing to use online guides to understand.

Although I complained about skills earlier due to them gating basic gameplay features, which is an issue, there are some great ones and they allow you to build a unique character.  The vast number of skills allows you to specialise in weapons, spaceships, movement, and many more options. Unfortunately to get to the really unique stuff you have to unlock a lot of basic features first. Often by the time you unlock a lot of these unique skills they can be pretty useless if cool though. Once you’ve upgraded your weapon skills you don’t really need the later skills as you are already destroying most of the enemies you come across in every combat encounter. This is another area that would have been a lot more fun if the enemies were just a bit better.

There are plenty of factions in Starfield that are all unique and most have quite different playstyles. I think this is an area where Starfield has improved over Bethesda’s recent titles. Many other recent games' faction quests would revolve down to very similar gameplay of just fighting guys but Starfield has an espionage focused faction and a bounty hunter type faction as well as some more normal factions. In addition, the faction quests have some of the better writing and more interesting quests. However, the factions still pale in comparison to Morrowind with its faction relationships and real sense of conflict between factions in the world. Unfortunately, the main questline was probably the most boring, which was really just a bunch of fetch quests for the first half. The way that you acquire powers is also quite frustrating and finicky making me avoid getting more powers than I had to since I didn’t get any that particularly changed how I played the game.

There’s also a few little features that I enjoyed like the great atmosphere the music creates and the ability to persuade people instead of fighting in a lot of situations. Equally there were some smaller things that annoyed me such as: FSR being enabled by default causing weird artifacting, loot being random and unrewarding, mining with the laser not always working, characters taking a moment to talk to you and having to stand up before they speak, it being difficult to line things up in outposts, there being no way to use illegally acquired items in your inventory before legally acquired ones and the long time to kill in later game encounters.

Overall, I have quite mixed feelings about the base game of Starfield. I enjoyed it for what it was and will probably come back to it when the DLC is released but I have little urge to play anymore at the moment unlike other Bethesda games. Hopefully along with the bigger DLC packs Bethesda will make some quality of life updates and fix some of the frustrating parts of the game. I was looking forward to modding Starfield as Bethesda games often have good modding communities as they release great modding tools. After playing the game I don’t have as much of a motivation to do this. I believe mods enhance good games and make them great but modding a game that you don’t want to play more of in the first place doesn’t usually fix the greater flaws of the game. Maybe if Bethesda makes some fixes though, modders will have a good base from which they can really enhance Starfield. Personally I’d say wait for a sale to play Starfield, it is good but is missing the spark to make it great.