Warning: light spoilers for the first several hours of Starfield.
I have a lifetime of fond memories of Bethesda games. I say this to provide full context for my criticisms below. After the first fifteen hours or so, I’m critical of aspects of the game and its design, but this shouldn’t be read as a full review. I get the sense that Starfield is an experience that gets better the more time you put in, and I’m enjoying it a lot.
From my first hours, I feel I can safely say this: Starfield is a flawed, ambitious near-masterpiece in need of a few patches and mods. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of game Bethesda has been releasing – to great success and critical acclaim – for years.
Years of Fond Gaming Memories
I can’t remember if I dabbled for long with The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first game in the franchise – I know I played it, but it didn’t leave a mark on my memory. But its sequel, Daggerfall, grabbed my attention for weeks.
Daggerfall was sprawling, ambitious, and riddled with significant bugs. Despite its technical flaws, it delivered an experience that nothing else on the market touched. It was a truly open world, an epic playground that invited player exploration and experimentation. In all ways, it set the tone for the “Bethesda model” for years to come.
Morrowind, the next game in the series, is still for many the high-water mark. A more focused experience than Daggerfall, Morrowind’s weird setting, compelling story, and deep mechanics came together in a great package I’ve replayed a dozen times. I’d rank it among my top-five games, and can still remember every line of the prison ship opening by heart.
Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 followed. Bethesda was off to the races, capturing a generation of players with a unique blend of open-world exploration, great environmental storytelling, and a mod-friendly game structure.
I bought them all – in the case of Skyrim, more than once, as “special” and “ultimate” editions were rolled out – and loved them all.
A Whole New World – or a Thousand of Them
Starfield is – rightly or wrongly – saddled with higher expectations than any Bethesda game that’s come before it. It’s a pillar of Microsoft’s Xbox strategy, a key exclusive in a console generation where they’re falling behind Sony. The game has had a massive marketing push, great advance word-of-mouth from influencers, and a strong launch of its digital premium edition, which was playable a week before the wide release on September 6th.
It’s also a brand-new intellectual property. Skyrim is the fifth main game in the Elder Scrolls saga; Fallout 4 is the second game of Bethesda’s rebooted franchise (the third if Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas, which uses the same engine and basic mechanics, is counted). Bethesda needed something new in its stable of titles, in order to build toward a successful future.
The process of creating a new intellectual property is risky. Starfield has to do a lot of heavy lifting compared to a new Elder Scrolls or Fallout game. Players are dumped into a sprawling science-fiction universe, without any of the context they would have for Skyrim, the fifth game in a series.
Bethesda does a great job of leaning into science-fiction tropes to keep things familiar and comfortable. This is most apparent in the main cities the player visits. There’s a high-tech classic science fiction city, all towering skyscrapers, curved surfaces, and elegant stores. There’s a “space western” city, complete with a marshall dealing with a bank heist, that’s strongly reminiscent of Firefly’s setting. There’s a neon-speckled riff on space Las Vegas plunked down on an ocean planet where it always rains, wearing its Blade Runner influence on its sleeve.
Similarly, the people you meet are familiar – gangs of spacers that prey on colonists, scientists seeking to unlock the secrets of the universe, religious cults, and corporate thugs. If there’s a character that’s a science-fiction trope, Bethesda has tossed it into the stew somewhere.
What holds the relatively generic elements of the game’s setting together is Bethesda’s always-stellar environmental work. The places you go, despite their diversity, still have a coherent feel – a human-centric future where the chunky buttons of NASA’s early days are married with modern high-tech screens, similar to how Fallout paired a fifties aesthetic with a post-apocalyptic setting.
From a design perspective, this is a great approach. It suffers in direct comparison to innovative, fresh settings built by other developers – but with the expectations Starfield has, and the risks inherent in building a new intellectual property, leaning into familiar elements was the right choice.
All the Features…
Starfield has enough features to fill out three or four lesser titles. There is tons of combat, of course – not competitive with modern FPS games, but more than serviceable and probably the best gunplay Bethesda has done. There’s looting; at times, the game has a Borderlands feel in the quantity of randomly generated guns it drops. There is crafting.
But wait, there’s more! There’s outpost-building, like Fallout. There are weapon and armor modifications. There’s character upgrading and skill trees. There are a million useless items in the world to either loot or decorate your equally-useless outposts with.
These features are all staples of Skyrim and Fallout, but Starfield throws even more into the mix – space combat, ship customization (you can build a ship entirely from scratch), research, planetary exploration, flora and fauna scanning (a feature that feels directly lifted from No Man’s Sky), and even abilities analogous to Skyrim’s Dragon Shouts.
All of the features play into the fantasy of a massive universe to explore with tons to do. It’s hard to ever be truly bored in Starfield – you can always switch gears and engage with a different aspect of the game.
The “kitchen sink” approach means no individual feature is best in class. There are games with better gun combat, and there are games with better space combat, and there are certainly games with better base-building. (That said, the new lockpicking minigame that replaces the long-standing minigame from Fallout and Skyrim is a standout – a genuinely great addition that’s fun every time, though poorly explained when you first encounter it.)
Indeed, some of the features feel half-baked. Shipbuilding is robust and complex but can be confusing (and almost entirely unnecessary given the large number of prebuilt ships for sale). Space combat is important, gating several key story moments, but isn’t common enough to feel core to the experience; it’s easy to make the mistake of ignoring critical piloting and gunnery skills until it’s too late.
…And All the Old Flaws
It’s a sad comment on Bethesda’s history that so many advance reviews are emphasizing that Starfield is Bethesda’s “least buggy launch ever!” Daggerfall’s early bugs were notorious and game-breaking; even Skyrim, Bethesda’s biggest and most evergreen game, had a rocky launch.
Fans are familiar with the routine. Official patches paired with hard work from the dedicated modding community always benefit Bethesda games.
Let’s get this out of the way: expecting a bug-free Starfield experience is a mistake. The game is enormous in scope and ambition and suffers from a constant stream of minor issues. Characters get stuck in geometry, conversations lock the player in place while other characters wander past their view, and I periodically encountered odd physics cases where small objects like dinner trays were knocked across the room, carving a path of destruction in their wake.
I have personally not experienced any blockers and only one crash, so in that sense, it’s a solid release. Once I thought I’d encountered a quest-related blocking bug, but it turned out to be a user error – indicative of a content design flaw or poor direction, perhaps, but not rising to the level of “bug.”
Similarly, there are clear areas where Bethesda struggles against its modern competition. Character models and animations feel dated, content design is heavily reliant on fetch quests or meaningless busywork, and inventory management (though it improves with some familiarity) suffers from a clunky UI.
None of these are new issues in Bethesda titles; if they didn’t bother you in Fallout or Skyrim, they won’t bother you here.
To The Future, and Beyond!
I’ve been reading other early criticisms of Starfield and many are unfair.
Some long-time Bethesda fans are bemoaning the loss of the “exploration” feel – that great sense of wandering to see what’s in the next cave or over the next hill that Skyrim, in particular, does so well.
Starfield is “chunked up” more than Fallout or Skyrim – you fast-travel from planet to planet, or even within a city from district to district. Yet given the scope of the game, I’d call this a sensible design choice. Space travel is important in Starfield, but it’s not the core – the game isn’t trying to compete with Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen (hah hah).
There are absolutely areas for players to explore in more depth – the cities are enormous, and out-of-the-way planets sometimes have a surprisingly good density of content. The “wandering” is still there, but it takes the form of picking which star system to visit next.
Not unexpectedly, Starfield suffers in early impressions when directly compared to the brilliant Baldur’s Gate 3. Reviewers correctly point out that the writing, reactivity, quests, and companions are an order of magnitude better in Larian’s runaway hit. In BG3, there are no meaningless fetch quests, the companions are all top-notch and engaging, the character models are beautiful, and the story opens with a much stronger hook than Starfield’s mushy, generic opening.
I can’t discount how my fresh impressions of Baldur’s Gate 3 have affected my opinions during my time with Starfield. BG3 is my Game of the Year – maybe my Game of the Decade – and Starfield isn’t great enough to dethrone it. But direct comparisons are unfair. The two games are striving for different things.
Bethesda has built a playground supporting a “live your life in space” model of play that’s miles away from the tight narrative beats and engaging companions at the core of BG3. Starfield expects you to slowly peel back its layers, ignoring entire systems until much later in the game. It’s confident enough in its overall design that it trusts players will stick with it after those first sluggish hours.
Nonetheless, if Starfield sales end up falling short of the massive expectations, it’s a warning sign that it’s time for Bethesda to consider upping its game. The unique sci-fi setting of Starfield buys the studio time; the next Elder Scrolls game, with its fantasy setting, will be more directly compared to Baldur’s Gate 3 and other modern fantasy RPGs.
If the majority of content in Elder Scrolls 6 is still thinly veiled fetch quests – and if companions continue to feel generic compared to the compelling, larger-than-life characters in games like Baldur’s Gate 3 – RPG fans may choose to invest their time elsewhere.
I’m enjoying my initial experience with Starfield and I expect to play it for a long time. Nothing so far has approached the emotional highs that I felt in my Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough, but I’m constantly entertained, never bored, and rarely frustrated.
In the end, Starfield is a Bethesda game through and through. Even in 2023 – the best year for gaming in a long time – that’s still a pretty awesome thing.
The standard edition of Starfield is available on Steam and Game Pass starting September 6, or the evening of September 5 depending on your timezone.