Starfield

It has been 1 month and 26 days since the release of Starfield, and in that time, I have logged 6 days with a total of 144 hours, give or take.

Now after the debacle of Fallout 76 it was important that Bethesda had a win in a major way for this title, and with all the time I logged I can confidently say it's kinda better?... ya that's what I want to say better.

Oh, Bethesda, Bethesda. What happened to you? Why have you become so lazy and complacent?

I'll start with the good...

The game is pretty and has a lot of interesting things to look at and explore, good questlines (sometiems), and ya, you know there are guns and then space guns... and I can't keep up this charade.

Starfield is the biggest game with the most restrictions I have ever played! Soo many game mechanics and decisions are made in this game purely for the sake of wasting your time!

The story is boring, uninteresting, and dull, and the writing here is just as bad. Admittedly, some questlines were interesting, but everything always just led to "Is that it? Oh, ok." Then this games "ending" is the biggest slap in the face I've felt from a games conclusion. I would give details on it, but to avoid spoilers, all I'll say is completely unsatisfactory.

All this sucks because the game is actually fun. The gunplay, the guns, and the ships. I can't begin to describe how many hours I've spent building and customizing my ship.

But the games' starkingly surprising limitations hold back everything. Also please Bethesda PLEASE dump this engine! It's time to put it to rest.

Yet still, for some inexplicable reason, this game receives high praise and scores! How? Why? The game has the worst ui, maps, and downright stupid enemy npcs.

Character customization is good, but clothing is extremely limiting in variety. There's basically one style and almost no women's apparel. This leads to another complaint: Why is there like no fashion for women in this game? Even when I want to role-play going out with my companion wife, I can't dress her up because there's absolutely no style for women, and that lack of variety led into many of my other role-playing experiences.

Finally, I'll speak about characters. They are ok. They are all just not at all well written. Now if like me you choose to take on a female companion as a wife, then get ready to be criticized for almost every little thing you do or don't do! If you want to be a space pirate, then you'll be hated. Unless I was Mr. Perfect all the time, I would hear about it from Sarah. There is no companion who is like down for anything or everything. It's just another limitation and lack of variety in personalities.

I'm sure there are plenty of other mechanics and systems in this game I'm forgetting to mention, but honestly, I'm tired and a little disappointed to review this any further.

I really wanted to love this game being the massive Bethesda fan I am, but because of the games limitations, restrictions, lack of variety, and subpar writing, it detracts from the experience. Though even after all that, I can not deny the amount of fun I did have, and the game does contain that Bethesda charm, so for that, I can be a bit lenient. But Bethesda, you have used up the last of my good graces. You are better than this. You have done better, and you should do better. So please, please don't screw up Elder Scrolls VI.

Final score: 6/10 3/5

Played on Xbox Series X and PC.

I'm a big Bethesda whore so I knew what I was getting into with this one and enjoyed what I could of it. What I absolutely expected and tried to ignore were the constant bugs and glitches Bethesda has become known for from the Elder Scrolls days of olde. From soft locked missions where entities do not appear that are supposed to in order to progress the mission to not being able to complete a mission because the planet I was on started rioting on their own because I attacked someone by accident, it's a bit of a mess. Thankfully though the main story missions weren't buggy and I was able to see it thru to completion. Alas what I did rather enjoy was the wanderlust the game portrayed. Countless star systems to explore, interesting dialogue choices with numerous outcomes. The ability to persuade, bribe and manipulate your way in and out of scenarios. And even the dogfights, while stiff as they were at times, felt cool and a definite broader direction for Bethesda made open world games. It was basically Fallout/Skyrim in space and that's fine. A fresh yet familiar feeling all the more while having the freedom to pretty much progress and do as you please. The graphics looked crisp but it's too bad the performance was choppy and framerate suffered at times in the larger open world areas. And even while there's hundreds of planets to explore, most outside of a handful feel desolate and bland. I guess they could only do so much before exhausting creative designs of more and more worlds. The combat is pretty much Fallout gunplay with utilizing your various medical items to cure ailments caused by the places you visit like super cold worlds you may get frostbite whereas others may have a thin atmosphere and you may contract radiation poisoning. Your spacesuits that you obtain do help repel these specific afflictions as well but only for a time. The story itself is just okay and ends in a way that reminds me of the Interstellar movie a bit. I put about 50+ hours into it before I decided to call it quits and I felt I had my fill by then. Overall, if you're a fan of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games like myself and are interested in playing that style of game whilst in a different setting that is pretty ambitious but in the end comes up a bit short in regards to other aspects like world building and still needing a digital exterminator for the amount of damn bugs present, then give this one a shot.

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.

Never before has a video game been able to give that sense of depth that space as a starfield can give. I'll say it right away for the most demanding, this is not a game that is worth its high expectations but it is so vast, complex and original that it is still worth a high rating and a purchase. Unfortunately, a fluctuating frame rate and 30fps resolution have weakened Starfield to the point of making some define it as a big disappointment, but that's not the case. Bethesda certainly promised something unattainable which was not achieved but the production remains solid, original and well studied, with an exaggerated amount of things to do and secondary missions to discover. Not excellent but certainly excellent, worth trying!

Starfield is a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. It desperately needs an editor to cut through all the idealistic but useless features to remind the developers that quality always trumps quantity. A rich world and fantastic side quests clash with an uninspired main quest and a plethora of performance issues that render the game's push for exploration anything but. It's a mix of the studio's Skyrim with the genre-defining Mass Effect series, but never quite satisfies those itches and leaves the player thinking of stronger experiences. I ran into a plethora of issues from glitches to outright crashes, spent an inordinate amount of time troubleshooting issues I shouldn't be worried about on console, and doing my best to accept that Bethesda doesn't seem to care to learn from lessons that have hurt them for decades.

While Starfield seems stuck between generations and intentions, it's still fun (frustrating fun, sure, but fun nonetheless). Its side quests shine and its crisp combat only gets better the more skills you unlock. Character creation and crafting your journey are both solid in design and execution, and the game does reward your investment. With all my criticism, I am excited for the universe's future and the undoubted refinements to come, but quality control needs a firmer, more moderate hand.