Let’s get this out of the way quick: Starfield appears to be a great game and I suspect everyone who’s even a little interested in it should probably try it. So far, all of my complaints are nitpicks. Let this post serve as a spoiler-free indicator of what to expect. I’ll either temper your expectations or kick your hype train into overdrive.
I’d heard two reports that the game was more like “Red Dead Redemption 2 in space” rather than a traditional Bethesda title. My brief time in the game conflicts with that statement. The music of the title screen immediately gave me Skyrim vibes. These vibes strengthened as the game faded into a cutscene that had me expecting one of the characters to say, “Hey, you… you’re finally awake!” Soon after coming into contact with the game’s MacGuffin, your character develops temporary amnesia, at which point the character editor is unlocked as you “remember” who you are, Fallout style.
The character editor has one strength: characters look better than they’ve ever looked in a Bethesda game. Unfortunately, the editor has many weaknesses, too. Recent titles like Street Fighter 6 and Diablo IV offered enough options for me to create fairly accurate replications of Brandon Lee’s The Crow (I don’t know why that’s my go-to character lately). Starfield’s character editor isn’t even close to being robust enough for that kind of detail. It offers you around thirty presets, maybe thirty hairstyles, and lets you change the oddly similar (and oddly familiar) faces within some pretty rigid parameters. Instead of having control over ear height, eye separation, etc., you decide if the preset face is round, square, thin, etc… that’s it.
As someone who has countless hours in No Man’s Sky and Elite: Dangerous (not to mention over a hundred games in my Steam library with the “space” tag), I was disappointed the first time I climbed aboard the starter ship to fly to another planet. There’s a short but rousing cutscene as the ship takes off, but then the game clumsily enters a loading screen. The next thing you know, you’re suddenly in space. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have expected an immersive sim from what could very well be the year’s best seller, but as a staunch fan of seamless ground-to-space transitions, this is my biggest disappointment so far.
Speaking of boundaries, on the first planet I visited after leaving the starting planet, I completed a main objective and was told to go back to my ship to continue the story. I decided to ignore said message and started walking to see if I could find any invisible walls. I set my sights on a distant piece of scenery that was so far removed from my landing spot that I was certain I would reach some sort of invisible wall or at least a warning to turn around. Not only did I not find any such boundaries, I saw a point of interest blip on my radar much farther away than my initial destination. I will experiment on this more when I play again, but so far (and I admit my sample size is relatively small) it looks like the explorable areas of planets might be absolutely huge. Though, I must confess my walk was quite boring.
Having recently played the new System Shock, I feel like I’m in familiar territory: so far, Starfield feels less like a next-gen defining game and more like a highly polished next-gen remake of a previous gen-game. So much of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout’s DNA is in this, which is to be expected and even desired, but some of the Bethesda aspects that have started to show signs of their age are present, too.
At any rate, I am absolutely hyped to play again and spend more time in the combat and checking the dialogue out with NPCs.
I’ll post more thoughts as I progress.
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