Starfield is Space: For Better and For Worse

After five years of hype, the wait is over.

Bethesda needed a win.

They hadn’t developed a new game since 2018’s Fallout 76, a much maligned sequel to Fallout 4. The Elder Scrolls had been riding the Skyrim high for 12 years, and everyone knew it – including Bethesda (remember Skyrim: Very Special Edition?). As a publisher, Redfall was a dud that killed Xbox’s summer momentum and Hi-Fi Rush was a rare win after 2022 only saw the lukewarm Ghostwire: Tokyo.

Things were not great.

The one hope on the horizon, the crossed fingers of every Xbox fan all over the world, was Starfield.

At E3 2018, only a few months before Fallout 76, director Todd Howard announced Bethesda’s first new IP in 25 years, and what he’d later describe as “Skyrim in space”. A short teaser trailer – showing only the logo and a few glamour shots – promised what fans had been wanting for decades: an open-world game set in the final frontier. And three years later, at E3 2021, the other shoe dropped. It would be an Xbox exclusive.

There have been other space games, of course. No Man’s Sky came back from the brink of broken trust and shoddy design to deliver a solid star-faring experience years after release. Star Wars has built a long-standing trust with gamers over the planet-exploring fun of Jedi: Fallen Order and Knights of the Old Republic. Heck, even Star Citizen, the ultimate catfish of a Kickstarter game (currently at $2.1 million and not out of beta), still has a strong sell on trekking through the upper atmospheres. But Bethesda, the granddaddy of the open-world game, announcing that they were throwing their hat into the ring? That changed everything. Even more so that it was exclusive to the Xbox Series X/S, a console that sorely lacked a selling point outside of Xbox Game Pass and was a distant third to the PS5 and Switch.

So fans waited. Trailer after trailer, interview after interview, and Xbox fans waited. With every new exclusive and blockbuster hit landing on the PS5 or Switch, there was always Starfield. Even when The Elder Scrolls: VI was teased, it was excitedly brushed aside for Starfield.

Now, we’re finally here. After five years of hype, the wait is over.

And it’s great.

Starfield has caught me in its tractor beam, and I’m not going anywhere.

To be clear, I was fully expecting Starfield to be just “good”. I loved my time with Skyrim and Fallout 4, but open-world games rarely grab me. They’re too weighty, too expansive, and often too buggy to truly hook me on them. So loading up Starfield was meant to be for review purposes only. I would clock in 15 hours, get the minimum of what I needed, and move on to my backlog.

I write this now with the 20/20 hindsight that that was never going to happen. Starfield has caught me in its tractor beam, and I’m not going anywhere.

Starfield opens the way any good Bethesda RPG does: waking up in an unfamiliar location with an NPC dumping exposition on you like there’s no tomorrow. In grand tradition, of course, things don’t stay quiet for long. Just a few moments after arriving at my new mining job, I unearth an alien artifact and receive a vision worthy of whatever drugs we have 300 years from now when the game takes place. A daring, charismatic explorer named Barrett arrives, tells me that I’m part of something bigger now (because of course I am) and I’m on his ship to meet with a group of space explorers called Constellation. Constellation is looking for more artifacts (because of course they are) and they send me off into the world as a newly-minted space ranger.

And I’m off.

Something Bethesda always does right is knowing when to let go of the leash. It takes longer this time around, sure, but the moment I leave the doors of Constellation I’m free. I don’t even bother with the main questline right away. I see a sign advertising a job opening at Ryujin Industries, the mega-corp to end all mega-corps, and I jump at it. Curiosity is king, and Bethesda throws so many opportunities at me I practically drown in questlines.

Even walking down the streets of New Atlantis, one of the main cities in the game, I’m bombarded with available paths to walk. Want to go undercover and infiltrate a pirate gang? Go nuts. Care to take a side in the uneasy peace between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective? Be a soldier! Maybe you want to visit your parents? You can visit your parents. No matter how big or how small, Starfield is about making the most of the world around you, and it’s intoxicating.

And the world is huge. There’s hundreds of planets to explore, and while not everyone is “Disney World” (more on that later), it’s overwhelming. Opening the world map for the first time and being bombarded with white dots was one thing. Recognizing that each white dot meant five or six planets was another experience entirely. And it’s all mine to see.

Now that I’ve been let loose by the Todd Howards that be, I can get a better feel for the gameplay itself. It runs just like Skyrim or Fallout 4 with a fresh coat of paint over the UI and a nifty jetpack for dynamic mobility. Stamina (now O2) is there, encumbrance (unfortunately) is there, and it all feels good…and familiar. This is a major boon for Starfield: its simplicity. Shoot, jump, run, talk. Compared to a more complex RPG like Witcher 3, which demands investment and pays it back in return, Starfield is like Pac-Man. But it works. I don’t need 3 hours to figure out how to boost jump, so I can spend that time flying between planets and pursuing mercenaries. It’s old hat from the folks at Bethesda, but they wear it well.

it’s harder to stumble across something; you must choose to find it.

Speaking of flying between planets, the ship controls and systems are somewhat flat. I’m still early on, so the system may deepen as time progresses, but I haven’t figured out how to make space travel feel smooth and enjoyable. Without dumping points into the skill tree to unlock things like thrusters, it’s a slog more often than not. So far, the best route for exploration has not been to stick out a dogfight and gun down enemy ships, but to simply fast travel to my objective and avoid the headache. It’s bland and sticky, and doesn’t gel well with the slick tones of land exploration. It could improve as I play and unlock upgrades, but at the moment something doesn’t feel right.

Fast travel is another odd choice. Older Bethesda entries encouraged walking, riding, and running to get from place to place, because there was always something to find on the way. With Starfield, its very nature means planets are lightyears apart. Traveling between solar systems isn’t riddled with easter eggs or caves, but instead more of an ordeal. It’s harder to stumble across something; you must choose to find it. This isn’t a terrible decision, but instead one that highlights Starfield’s biggest (and perhaps only) point of contention: it is space.

Of course, it’s space. It was bound to be space, after all. But space is big, and empty, and cold. Starfield is big, and empty, and cold. Entire planets are barren wastelands, meaning it’s entirely chance if you find a point of interest. The Settled Systems feel less like a cohesive world where a decision on the right side of the map affects an NPC’s dialogue on the left. But that’s by design. Because it’s space.

Speaking with the New York Times, Todd Howard and managing director Ashley Cheng have gone on record saying that “the point of the vastness of space is you should feel small. It’s overwhelming…not every planet is supposed to be Disney World”. This is a good thing, of course, because if every planet in the 100 systems of the game was chock full of content the game would never come out. And when you do find something, it’s that much sweeter. But those moments are a touch rarer than previous Bethesda games, and that’s a tough pill to swallow.

That said, even though there’s not much to see sometimes, what there is to see is absolutely beautiful. Colors are vibrant and befitting alien worlds, lighting is a marvel, and the sound design is quality as well. Starfield itself is an argument for the next generation of consoles, with quicker load times, beautiful environments, and the most sophisticated facial designs Bethesda has ever had.

That’s not saying much, as the bar was already low. But it’s better than it’s ever been.

Even though there’s not much to see at times, what there is to see is absolutely beautiful.

Starfield feels like a step in the right direction for Bethesda, in spite of its small flaws. It’s massive and magnificent, layered and action-packed. Figuring out flight (assuming there is something to figure out) will add an entirely new dimension to the experience, even if fast travel is ultimately better. I’ll be sinking dozens of hours on the sole desire to see as much as I possibly can. And I know there are people out there who will sink hundreds, and some even thousands of hours more.

I applaud Bethesda for committing to such a grounded interpretation of what space might look like – even if it’s a blessing and a curse.

SCORE: 8/10

Starfield is a bold new frontier for open world games, even if that frontier doesn’t always hold much. If this is the direction Bethesda is headed in, then they should set thrusters to full.