This is a game that needs no introduction. We’ve been waiting 10 years for Bethesda to release Starfield and it’s finally here. What’s most surprising about the entire thing though is how much secrecy is behind this long-awaited sci-fi role playing epic. But now it’s time to pull the curtain back (at least a bit) and give you an idea of what Starfield is all about. The Otaku Authority actually had the opportunity to take a second look at the game through another set of eyes as well, so if you’re interested, please also take a look at our alternate opinion on Starfield here. It’s more interesting than you might think as this is likely to be a very divisive game across the community!
Of course, this is a Todd Howard game and Bethesda has been grinding away at it for a decade so you might see a few things that are familiar here, but let’s start with the basic premise. Unsurprisingly, you’re working in space on a planet when things go a little wonky. You end up meeting a fellow who brings you into a group of like-minded people who explore the galaxy because, well, space RPG. You’ll note at this point that there are no real spoilers in this review because the entire game is story-based and it would be a shame to ruin the experience. The main quest is a good 30 hours long and you can tack on another 8 or so for each of the major side quests for all of the different groups in the game.
Regardless, it’s time to explore the galaxy and to do so, you’ll be flying about in your very own (well, sort of) spaceship! This is what you’d been waiting for, isn’t it? Starfield is a massive game with tons of worlds to explore and that’s the draw. Naturally there are comparisons to draw to No Man’s Sky here too. Unlike No Man’s Sky, you can’t fly down to the planet in the same way. You have to select landing points and the ship just lands in a sequence. The worlds themselves aren’t as complete as you might expect either. They have preset visible and hidden exploration areas and you can only go so far in a given direction before being unable to proceed. They do look vast, but many (again much like NMS) are fairly empty, devoid of all but a handful of resources. You can even go to Earth if you want to (it’s not all that pretty though).
The galaxy is pretty vast and you can go anywhere without restriction. Your jump drives only go so far though and to get to some areas, you’ll need to upgrade ships which can be pricey. There’s also the matter of enemy ships patrolling space in some sectors and you’ll have to fight. Combat is old-school dogfighting and you have the option of changing views to the cockpit or to a trailing ship view at the touch of a button. Your ship systems are controlled by the d-pad , allowing you to allocate more power to grav drives (read jump drives), engine, shields, and various weapons systems including ballistic, missile, and electromagnetic weapons if your ship has them. On the XSX, hitting the left shoulder button enables a scan and lock-on system that lets you target enemy ships and hit them more easily but your initial ship feels like flying in peanut butter and you’re definitely going to want to upgrade.
Dogfighting is tedious in Starfield and that’s a bit of a shame. Other games like Chorus (review here) and Everspace 2 (review forthcoming) are significantly more space combat focused than Starfield and have much more refined (and fun) space control schemes. You’d think after a decade in development that space combat would have been a tooth-grinding intense experience but that’s simply not the case. Your initial ship is underpowered but even once you get a combat ship, you either massively outclass the other ships or manage to survive but either way you end up flying in loops with limited finesse, slowly trailing enemies until you get a lock and then blasting the crap out of them with everything. Even in major late-game battles, if you have the right ship, it’s just a matter of patience to defeat major enemies, not skill. Space combat is certainly part of the game, but it’s not particularly exciting here.
Let’s get back to the story. We’re not going to ruin the main story but there are plenty of major locations and tropes that the game hits. You’ll get to play a space cowboy, a Starship Troopers-esque experience, become a space pirate (or not), and even have religious experiences. There’s plenty of variety in Starfield and that’s no surprise because the game follows the Todd Howard template almost to a fault. Turns out one of the problems with 10 years in development is that you end up with a game that feels like it’s 10 years old. One of the biggest expectations here was some innovation from Bethesda and it’s just not here. If you’ve played Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4, you have some pretty clear expectations as to what you’re getting into and you’re not wrong. Starfield combines aspects of Skyrim and Fallout 4 and basically puts them in space.
What you should expect is a main quest with what are essentially spokes off of a wheel that consist of major quest lines for factions within the Starfield universe. Each spoke lets you experience a different aspect of the Starfield experience. They’re all optional of course but the easiest way to complete the main quest is to finish at least one major faction quest which will provide you with rewards that allow you to proceed more effectively. For our review, we tried to complete only the main quest with limited side quest interaction but that turned out to be impossible. The game design specifically forces you to complete at least one side quest, locking you behind artificial progress walls due to the need for effective spaceships to proceed. You can buy them of course but it’s faster to complete a faction quest and get a spaceship than it is to save up for one. There’s a level of constraint here that literally makes you have an experience whether you like it or not, a distinct departure from the much more open No Man’s Sky. That’s not a bad thing but it’s also kind of unexpected.
The big expectation for Starfield was that it would be innovative. Bethesda has been pimping the game for a long time and with all the vague promises we’ve heard about a complex, open world experience, the main draw for the game is innovation. What you’ll find here is kind of the opposite of that. If you’ve played The Outer Worlds, you’ll essentially find the same type of experience here, only with a bit more freedom and some space combat. The story isn’t the same but the structure is and perhaps most telling of all, a distinct lack of innovation. This is Space Skyrim mixed with Space Fallout 4. Pull back from the story and the swanky visuals and the same basic structure permeates all three games. There’s main quest, faction quests, base building (optional here, unlike Fallout 4) and Starship building (also optional). That’s pretty much it. If you manage to complete the main quest without getting utterly sidetracked (kind of a staple in Bethesda releases), there’s even a New Game Plus mode that changes things up a fair bit, but the recipe remains pretty much the same.
Now, don’t think that Starfield is a bad game here. It’s not. It’s more that we had no idea what to expect and that there’s a lot of potential in exploring random worlds. You can do that. There’s also a very focused main story that manages to hit more sci-fi tropes than you’d think was possible. That’s not a bad thing necessarily (depends on your point of view about sci-fi). It’s more that expectations for the game are so high that some people are inevitably going to be disappointed and others are going to think it’s a glorious, transcendent experience (especially those that shelled out for the rather expensive Constellation Edition).
Just like the main story design, the details of the gameplay are quintessentially Bethesda as well. The vast majority of play consists of 1st person looter/shooter combat and dialogue options, much like every other Bethesda title. This is no Fallout: New Vegas though. Expect something along the lines of Space Skyrim and an improvement from Space Fallout 4 and you’ll be fine. Most missions require you to visit a planet, explore an area or two, talk to some people, and kill a bunch of aliens or bad guys. Along the way you’ll loot until your encumbrance gets maxed out or you learn what to pick up and what not to pick up. You’ll pick locks (a bit time consuming) and search safes and locked storage boxes, avoid or take space drugs, and use battle enhancing puffers and obtain a fairly standard progression of rare, epic, and legendary weapons and armor to obliterate the enemy.
Lasers are particularly effective against most enemies and if you scrounge enough ammo and Med Packs (there’s a noticeable shortage in most of the game), you can pretty much brute force your way through any scenario between shotguns of various types and lasers. You can modify pretty much all weapons, armor, and space suits if you collect enough resources but it’s a tedious affair. You must either have the resources to modify on your body (reducing your carrying capacity…one of the worst holdovers from other Bethesda games) or on your ship (which also has a surprisingly limited carrying capacity). You can also research a variety of new items, armor, and weapon mods on your ship or at your home base or outpost (if you build one).
Sounds kind of like Skyrim and Fallout 4 right? Base building and ship building are present but for the main game, not only are they unnecessary but they’re wildly expensive and you definitely won’t be doing any of that. The same goes for the inevitable house you can buy (at a huge cost of course). Even buying new ships (at least good ones) is so expensive that even when you’re at the end of the main quest in the game, you’ll barely have enough money to buy a fancy high-powered ship and it honestly just isn’t worth it. There’s an absolute ton of menu management here and more hours than necessary are spent on figuring out just what to dump off and where to reduce encumbrance (easily one of the worst gameplay inventions of all time). Just like Skyrim, you’ll have dumping sites to drop all the crap that you don’t’ want to risk losing but can’t carry around. This time around though, encumbrance is even worse because it affects your oxygen levels while wearing a space suit. You’ll never take your suit off even if you’re the only one because it’s a huge menu hassle to do so but running decreases oxygen and during combat if you run out of air, you die. Fun.
Yeah, you die from lack of air. You have to manage how much you carry and your oxygen reserves. If you’re over-encumbered, every step drains precious air but you need the resources and it’s a constant balancing act to figure out how to manage it all. You can dump stuff off on your ship but it’s an obscure sub-menu (pause, select ship, then press X on the XSX). In fact, a fair amount of Starfield consists of learning how to navigate obtuse menus. You can pause and hit X to fast travel to objectives, skipping a bunch of time-wasting menus to space travel quickly, but then you can’t easily select in-system or multi system areas to travel to while you’re on a mission. For that you need to access the star map in the upper left hand portion of the pause menu. Need to change a weapon? Lower right hand inventory, unless you hot-listed your weapons onto the D-pad menu. Then you can access them there. There’s no other easy way to pick weapons. It’s honestly a lot and PC players are going to have a much easier time than XSX players because there simply aren’t enough commands available on the controller to effectively manage Starfield. The XSX Starfield LE controller has directions as to what to press for a reason, that’s for sure. This is a ridiculously complex game in terms of context menus because many buttons serve dual or even triple functions depending on the situation. You get the hang of it after a while but at first, you’re definitely floundering while you learn what every button does and is capable of doing.
It’s a lot to take in. Like all Bethesda games, you can literally just blast your way through the story and make enemies along the way or you can talk to people and negotiate your way through. Bump up that persuasion a few levels and do some persuasion drugs and you can even con the characters at the end of the game into doing whatever you want, no fight required. BSing your way through is an effective strategy throughout Starfield. To do that, you’ll need to bump up a variety of stats for your character though. Every level up gives you one point to allocate towards character advancement and you can modify your skills accordingly. You can use those points to level up the skill choices too, allowing you an even more variable character that can perform a ridiculous variety of tasks once you progress far enough in the game. You’ll choose classes at the beginning which give you different starting stats so everyone is different as well. There’s a personal character designer too of course (standard Bethesda) that lets you tailor your looks and stats to your personal whims.
Lost yet? This barely scratches the surface of Starfield. You’ve got your main quest, your faction quests, your Outpost gameplay, exploration, personal approach, and all of the crap on all the worlds you visit and scan. You can travel to every visible star on the map too. There’s just a lot going on here. What’s weird about Starfield is with all that crazy amount of stuff going on, the game feels small. Sure, you can go to a ton of planets and do pretty much anything, but at the same time, you’ll see level layouts that are basically mirror images of each other. Occasionally you’ll enter a cave only to find that it’s an identical layout to one you’ve already been in. Sure the items change each time you land and enemies come back but it’s surprisingly limiting in scope. Planets start to look the same, layouts start to look the same, and more often than not, you’re wandering across barren landscapes devoid of anything interesting for no purpose at all. You can explore but if space is this empty, would you want to?
The simple fact is that for all the hype and all the excitement surrounding Starfield, it’s a quintessentially Bethesda experience. It’s a fun game and combat is excellent but the plot leaves something to be desired and as expansive as all the options are, they somehow manage to feel a bit restrictive as well. Space combat is weak, dialogue and options are more limited than you might expect and the entire experience is somehow lacking just a bit more than it should be.
On the other hand, the visuals in Starfield are nothing short of spectacular. Planets look neat and enemies show a wide variety of cool visuals. Weapons are fun and greatly varied and the characters are quite detailed and interesting. This is definitely a pretty game, and at first, you honestly won’t know where to look. The sheer amount of background items you can interact with is hard to process and there are enough varied environments that they won’t start to feel stale for quite some time as you play. Eventually the awe starts to wear off, everything feels familiar and you just start hunting for clearly recognizable items (searchable boxes, lockers, and the like) but it’s definitely an impressive experience, especially initially.
The audio in the game is something special too. The voice acting throughout the game is simply outstanding and the myriad of voice actors really add an extra dimension to gameplay that might otherwise be stale. Sam Coe, Sarah Morgan, and Walter Stroud are particularly standout performances and Vladimir, Vasco, and Barrett are also excellent. The script for characters is well-done overall and there is copious voice acting, even from supporting characters. Add to that the excellent space sound effects, the weird creature effects, and a host of other neat audio tidbits and from and audio and visual perspective, you’ve got yourself one hell of an immersive experience with Starfield.
Then there are the negatives. As with all Bethesda games, there are bound to be bugs in something this complex. The initial review copies of the game were fairly buggy but the pre-release patch seems to have solved most of that. Without another playthrough, it’s impossible to tell what you might see as bugs in these games tend to be fairly specific to individual play but the Day One patch seems to have resolved all of the texture dropout and other issues we experienced during the review playthrough. Considering how expansive of a game Starfield is, the number of issues that have been fixed for launch is astonishing and this will be a much cleaner experience than previous releases. From a design aspect however, encumbrance is still irritating and contraband in particular is frustrating.
It’s hard to earn money in Starfield and it’s a slow creep to get the cash you need for major purchases like a house, a ship, and so on. One of the most valuable commodities in the galaxy is contraband though. Illegal weapons, ethically questionable bio-experiements, and so on. Unfortunately, when you arrive in a major system, they scan your ship and arrest you for carrying it, charging you a fine and making you waste time leaving the security facility. To conceal your contraband and profit effectively off of it, not only will you have to find a broker willing to buy it but you’ll have to upgrade your ship to hide the contraband. Since starship modification is a late-game thing for the most part, you end up stuck with a buch of contraband you can’t sell which is frustrating because the value means the difference between getting a better starship that can hide your contraband sooner and not. It’s a lose-lose situation. You can’t stash your ill-gotten gains on a planet either. Every time you leave and come back, the boxes reset and anything you left behind, no matter how valuable, is gone. Unless you can find a secure place (like your ship or a safe in a home base) you can’t stash it and to get to those, you’d have to get by security. It’s an irritating Catch-22.
Add to that the need to upgrade to progress in the main story, weapon and armor deficiencies (you really have to find most of your good weapons…you definitely can’t buy them), and a fairly slow progression of skills due to the combination of skills and skill levels and you end up with a game that holds you back as much as it lets you explore. At level 29, we’d barely scratched the surface of the skill progression chart with not a single skill past the first row of skill options. There are something like a hundred skills and every one of them has four tiers. With each tier costing a skill point and only one point per level, that leaves you pretty high and dry in terms of fleshing out the skill chart. Honestly, if you could crank every one up to max, you’d essentially be an untouchable god in the game and chances are good that PC mods will let you do that quite quickly after launch, but it’s still frustrating to see all the stuff you could do and realize that you probably won’t get to. To reach each tier of a skill you have to accomplish a variety of tasks as well, such as picking X number of locks to upgrade your lockpicking skills or making a certain number of grav jumps or laser kills to upgrade lasers or navigation. It’s all just more stuff to keep you playing for longer and while that’s not a bad thing, we did spend some time just jumping from system to system pointlessly in order to progress in one portion of the game.
Ultimately, what you’re going to get out of Starfield is the quintessential Bethesda experience, unchanged by the ravages of time. A moderately sized main quest accompanied by a bevy of faction quests and some open world options that clearly incorporates a core experience that hasn’t significantly shifted in game design in the last decade. It’s neat that you get an additional game mode when you finish the game and there are plenty of options for building once you get far enough and accumulate enough money so the average player will probably pull a solid 100+ hours out of the game. But there are plenty of design concerns too and if you’re looking for a unique and innovative experience, you might not get everything you wanted.
Starfield is the Space Skyrim/Fallout you’ve been looking for but it isn’t anything you haven’t seen before at the same time. There are plenty of secrets and surprises out there in the dark waiting to be found, but in terms of things that are fresh and new, you might get a few hopes dashed. There’s no question that this is an excellent game experience and it runs like a dream on the Xbox Series X, but the gameplay feels a bit too familiar and the overall experience is definitely held back by that. Bethesda fans are going to go wild for Starfield and the majority of players will likely have a great time, but this is not the game of the century that you might have been hoping for. Instead it’s a top tier Bethesda game that’s fun to play and surprisingly immersive, warts and all. It’s no Fallout: New Vegas, but at least it’s no Fallout 4 either. Regardless, this is one space RPG that’s worth having in your collection and one that’s going to be around for quite some time, so you should probably give it a spin!
This review is based on a digital copy of Starfield provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X system using a 1080p Sony 55” TV. Starfield is also available for PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.
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