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Negatives: Starfield feels extremely outdated.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Overall Starfield is a good game that is held down by Bethesda's outdated game design, mediocre writing and old engine.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.

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 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.

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.

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!