Starfield

After five long years of waiting and rampant speculation, Starfield finally released this year on September 6th. Was it worth the wait?

Positives: Starfield has some of Bethesda's best cities out of all of their games, New Atlantis, Akila City, Neon, Paradiso, Cydonia and New Homestead are all extremely interesting areas with tons of side missions to do.

The combat in this game is very easy to get used to and is extremely fun.

The amount of content you get in this game is what you expect when you pay £70/$70. It's truly a testament of how much bethesda love making video games and their passion for them.

Faction quests are also fantastic in this game, the UC Vanguard quest line being my favourite had an incredible movie like story with great action set pieces. The Crimson Fleet storyline was so much fun playing as an undercover agent trying to damage them from within. The Freestar Collective quest line has this awesome mandolorian feel to it as you become a space ranger. The Ryujin Industries quest line is probably the weakest of the bunch but still has great moments as you climb the slippery corporate ladder to get to the top.

Negatives: Starfield feels extremely outdated. Facial animations and controls are very early 2010s and the game just doesn't flow very fluidly. The bethesda "jank" is just unacceptable these days.

The abundance of loading screens is ridiculous, it is so immersion breaking when you have to load everywhere.

Starfield unfortunately suffers from the typical bad bethesda main story. It is extremely uninteresting and the amount of missions that are just fetch quests is ridiculous and time wasting.

The companions in the game are just flat out boring, there are no companions with personalities (except Andreja) everyone is just objectively good and morally righteous, it's so annoying. If you had bad karma in fallout 3, you would attract companions that were also scum bags, why not bring this back?!?

Exploration outside of the main cities is really disappointing. There is absolutely nothing to see and do, no interesting planets or Easter eggs. It makes the game feel so small and artificial.

Lore in this game isn't that interesting either, it's not bad but nowhere near the level of elder scrolls and fallout. It is very generic.

Overall Starfield is a good game that is held down by Bethesda's outdated game design, mediocre writing and old engine. Here's hoping Bethesda listen to a lot of the criticisms for Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5.

Starfield, the "final frontier" where no developer dared to finish, in other terms, Starfield is a rush job project that needs one year to bake in the oven in which ends up being an average game. I don't know how to tell you if you're going to like it or not, some people likes it and others don't, if you like it, cool. In my case i will tell you my point where ever since i was a kid i followed all sorts of media containing SciFi stuff, and im sometimes biased on it, but i will tell you what is good about the game first in which im around 100 hours.

Graphics and sound are great, not the best but like other space games you will receive your share of eye candy exploring the cosmos. The game at least gives you a lot of stuff to do even so half of the quests can be somewhat repetitive or just average but one thing for sure some side quests are way better than most of the main quest of the campaign. And combat mechanics meaning as in you, you will find it familiar like in other first \ third person shooter from bethesda.

Now to the somewhat bad part, yes... the game is riddled with bugs, as each player have seen its share and most of them have different scenarios in what bugs they have witnessed, more or less.

The Combat AI for the NPC's specially in ground combat are bad and way to easy, along the game you have to set the difficulty up to very hard to even recieve some challenge but at least space is more challenging until you get the hang of it in which space battles are ok, not much to say in that part... but returning to the ground combat aspect, as in my play-through , when i had the means to travel, i was traveling systems and combating NPC's 30 or more levels higher than me and i always managed to get the upper-hand in which the only good part of me being level 15 and the NPC level 50 or beyond was good to farm them for better items and i manage to get better weapons in which made easier to kill hostiles through out the main quest, and up to a point where being a low level i managed to go to the planet where the last mission is at, fun but the best way to get out of it was that, to ramdom stuff and finish the game whenever you wanted.

Now, lets talks about the Scifi elements of the game, yes, there is, cant complain, but is mostly generic, yes there is space exploration to the limits of the game, space battles, and Dragonborn slash Spaceborn powers, yeah, its a reskin of the temples where you get super powers in skyrim. But overall, another game falls in to the generic, uninspired scifi writing that is plaguing many games in which the slap some artifacts and wala, you got a "grand" secrets of the universe. The powers are useless in which I only gathered three of them since they don't really help you and later on I finished the game, and acquiring them just falls flat, you get to this temple, activate the rings by touching to energy particles, repeat until you acquire them and you're spawned back outside, and done.

And now to the ugly, the story but at least the story is average in which the scifi elements do suffer like i described before, but what brings it down is the dialogues, they are bad, they are awful and this is Bethesda once again setting one dude according to the credits to write the entire game but there are moments where it doesn't fit to the current situation, sometimes you are just a child, stupid , flirting/romance is all over the place, and there is this part when you meet for the first time one of the main antagonist, the hunter, and escape to the lodge, you literally become a little kid, when you arrive to the base, your dialogue sounds like you're running to your parents crying because some other kid in the neighborhood hit you.

Bethesda standards are in the ground in this one, to think and it looks like many of the old staff don't work with them any more, in which puts the next elder scrolls at risk to receive mediocre content specially in the story department, we saw quality drop in fallout 4 even so is still famous on things you can do outside of the main content of the game in which they tried to exploit the sand box part and do a bad job with fallout 76 in which they tried to do the cash grab at first with the "sandbox" experience in an empty map until they had to actually gather everyone and finish the game and once more they do that in starfield.

The scope and vision cannot be grander. And Starfield indeed looks grand from the first minutes. The various mechanics and systems built into the game, from spaceship building to planetary exploration, are truly amazing, enough to fill multiple decent games.

But that's where the positives end. Starfield produces almost no gel, either in the form of a good story or cohesive world building, to hold its different parts together. The grand scope becomes pointless and bleak when there is no narrative to drive it. The various mechanics do not talk to each other and start to feel redundant very early. The saddest thing is when you push yourself to invest in some of them and they are proven to be redundant by the end of the game.

Bethesda seems to think that just because it's the first universe in 20 years for Bethesda (it's Bethesda!), players will just stick around for hundreds and hundreds of hours until they eventually truly appreciate all that's built within this grand scope. That's hubris. I felt a tinge of nostalgia I completed the game. Then I immediately deleted it and all my saves. What a disappointment.

Other than the faces of people (and a few bugs which most games have today unfortunately), this game is absolutely incredible. I'm almost 100 hours in and really feel as i'm just getting into the thick of it. There's is literally so much to do in this game and all of the environments are beautiful. I was a little disappointed when I found out that there wouldn't be as much in space (or "In the Starfield" as they call it in game) but the rest of the game definitely makes up for it. Maybe it's because I have been waiting for a game exactly like this forever, but it's definitely my new favorite game.

Starfield is a typical Bethesda game which is fine for 10+ years ago. I wanted to like it... I still want to like it but I can't. I can't entirely place my finger on all the issues. I can tell you several of them. The world is large and empty... really empty. Like I know you were "trying for boring" so we could experience what space is like. Well... let me say it is a video game! It isn't real life. It isn't supposed to be. May be try for quality over quantity in the next game.

The game starts slow. I would love to say it gets better but for the most part it doesn't. When you finally get to the part that starts explaining everything, the game is pretty much over. Not to forget to mention (at least for me) that the game got super buggy. Like crash on load screens (and there are way to many of those) and frame rate issues. Oh my ship didn't render properly for half the game so every cut scene showed me floating through space or hovering down to the planet. Once again many many many many many load screens. (I under exaggerate.) Like I play the game while doing other thing there are so many load screens.

When it does come down to the action, it is ok as a first person shooter aside from the AI ammo passing through solid objects and I really like the dogfighting but good luck trying to dogfight on the regular. As a RPG I didn't feel it. I just kept getting the feeling that I'm not improving my character as much as I am being less punished if I can just get the next level and then the next level comes and you are still bored.

Like seriously who played the game to be a space pirate. That was sure on my list of things to do and then came the bounties. Steal a ship worth 14k (3k after registration... why yes I'm sorry let me register my my pirate ship) and then 45k in bounties for stealing it. Aww I see Bethesda make sure you drain all the fun out of it.

Then there is their morality standards... not sure what they are since I accrued fines for nothing multiple times through the game. Bounty system broken. Sneak system... is there a real one? Morality harping from story line character. (Hint Bethesda this is a role playing game. I play with different morality laws based on my role and you pulled me right out of role playing with your game.)

Don't get me wrong I put hours into the game with hopes that I would like it more but every time I started to think it was getting better the game just stopped me and was like 'NO'.

If you are a hardcore Bethesda fan then play the game. You might like it. If you didn't care for their previous work, run cause this is one of their worst so far considering how far technology and gaming have come. I played the game on game pass. I bought it for a month. I am glad I didn't buy the game. Don't. It is worth 1 month of game pass. Play it. Push through it if you can and drop it and forget about it like so many other are doing.

Oh Bethesda how far you have fallen or is it your Microsoft overlords? We may never know now.