When choosing a new character, some traits can affect your ability to persuade NPCs while others might make you the target of people who are trying to hunt you down. If you have the same religion as some NPCs, they may feel an affinity to you, or you can even choose to be a devoted child who sends money home to your parents. Your parents’ appearances will be based to an extent on your character’s appearance as well; a nice touch.
As for the gameplay, there is a lot going on here. Combat feels fairly smooth in Starfield, but there are definitely some issues. The way weapons are handled is rather interesting as some weapons are far more suited to certain situations than others. For example, ballistic weapons may not be the best for certain environments so you will need to use one more fitting, perhaps one that is designed for zero-g. This attention to detail is a neat touch which adds a degree of strategy to keep gameplay fresh. Some weapons will even have an impact on your character in certain areas, pushing you back or requiting you to modify and upgrade them in order to advance your skills. Learning how weapons function is a key part of the game and you cannot just treat them all like any ordinary weapon.
Character creation is much more detailed in Starfield than in previous Bethesda titles, with many more options to help your character feel right for you. You can select more details to help provide your character with a backstory and even a religion, as well as character traits that directly impact the game. These aren’t traditional classes like in a typical RPG but traits play a role in the gameplay and will affect the way you experience Starfield.
Interaction with NPCs is handled differently as well and you will need to find new ways to achieve your goals. That is not to say that interaction is now needlessly complex, instead that this is a deeper experience. Companions are a great aspect of the game and are handled better than in Skyrim and Fallout 4, addressing some of the fan complaints from those titles. Companions all feel fully realized and selecting different companions will result in fundamentally different experiences in Starfield.
Right from the beginning of the game, there are a ton of things to do, but exploration does take a bit of time to get used to and you will find yourself interacting with the environment in a variety of ways. You can extract resources from a planet’s surface and obtain materials which is key to upgrading. One thing you will need the resources for is to modify your weapons, armour, and space suits, which can all be modified. Modifications have the additional benefit of enhancing your skill progression, as do modifications for your ship and building and expanding a home. You can interact with objects and research new items and weapons on your ship or home base, but you will need those resources, and resource management is integral to the game. You will also need to find places to store the various things you collect because they can over-encumber you very rapidly.
There are many places to explore in Starfield and exploring is something that can take over gameplay for hours at a time. One of the things I enjoyed the most about Skyrim was just exploring the environment and seeing events play out in the world. I love that that feeling is still present in Starfield and it really enhances the gameplay. Of course there is a main quest to follow as well, but that is just one part of the much larger Starfield experience. With side quests, exploration, and factions, Starfield is a game that is much more expansive than the average title.
This is not to say that the game is perfect though. Playing on PC is mostly a smooth experience, but it is clear the game was designed with a controller in mind. The combat and control interface takes some getting used to with a mouse and keyboard and the controls are fairly complex overall. Spaceship flight and combat is also a bit lacking and definitely not a highlight I expected it to be. Getting a spaceship is a great part of the game, and when you acquire new ships and create your own, it’s a surprisingly enjoyable experience. Once you actually fly those ships though, things become much more complicated. Flying the ship is challenging with a controller, and combat is extremely clunky. Playing with a mouse and keyboard is noticeably smoother and slightly easier to handle but still not anywhere near as intuitive and comfortable as it should be. Given how much spaceships and space combat were hyped up as a major component of Starfield, this afterthought approach is disappointing and something I wonder if mod creators will be tackling soon after release.
When you first get a ship, you can only travel a limited distance. To go futher, you’ll need to upgrade and the various inputs to control your ship take a bit of getting used to. These are controlled by the d-pad when playing on a controller, and you will need to carefully allocate energy to your engine, grav drives, weapons and shields. Banancing this keeps you from running into trouble in a combat situation. When playing with a mouse and keyboard, this takes a bit of time to get used to and manage the keys, but when you do, it quickly becomes a second nature.
Of course, while flying spacecraft in an RPG, there will be other ships to encounter and often fight. While you might expect smooth dogfighting, it just does not work here. This is easily the worst part of the game and tracking ships is a massive chore. You need to be able to turn fast to go after ships and this will involve stopping suddenly in order to reorient to catch fast-moving enemy vessels. The combat is also extremely uneven even after upgrading your ship and while exploring might be fun at first, spaceship combat never gets to the point where you’re spoiling for a fight.
Piloting and planetary exploration also brings up another issue. You can only land on planets in select locations and while there are some worlds that offer much to explore, there are many that are rather empty. Most worlds only have a few preset exploration areas, and while some are hidden for you to find, they are still limited in how much you can explore before you run into an invisible wall. This brings up one other issue that needs to be mentioned and that is something that holds Starfield back from being the best game it could be: the Creation Engine that powers the game. Starfield uses a new version of Bethesda’s classic engine called Creation Engine 2, but for all the advances in tech, it still is an older engine that feels outdated compared to other graphics engines that have much more potential.
The curious thing is that Bethesda Softworks, which Bethesda Game Studios is part of, actually owns other proprietary engines that are more advanced and can accomplish much more. The Id Tech engine is an extremely capable engine for example, and before anyone says that it is an engine only for FPS games, id Tech 5 was used for The Evil Within and a modified version was used for the sequel which became the Stein engine. Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks are now part of Microsoft which owns more proprietary engines, that would also be ideal for games like this, so it is my hope that future Bethesda Game Studios titles move away from Creation Engine and embrace one that allows them to do more.
It must be noted that overall, Starfield is an extremely polished game aside from engine choices, especially when compared to how previous Bethesda Game Studios titles launched. Review copies of Starfield initially had bugs and issues, including some game breakers, but a pre-launch patch has actually fixed almost, if not all of them and the game runs extremely well now. This title is extremely well-optimized, and I was able to push beyond 30 FPS and experience the title in its full glory.
Starfield also has some interesting takes on side quests and factions, and they do not play out the way you might expect. Side quests are much more involved than previous games and events unfold in unique ways, giving you more perspective on the worlds within the game. Factions are also handled in a way that feels refreshing and not in the exact same template as Skyrim or Fallout. There are multiple ways to go approach objectives, and factions and side quests are often the best way to obtain resources and items you need to progress in the game.
With all there is to do in Starfield, playing the main quest alone will only show you about one-sixth of what Starfield has to offer, and you will definitely not experience the game the way this is meant to be played. Starfield is a game you are meant to explore in-depth, finding a myriad of little secrets and slowly learning about the universe, and while this may seem tedious to some, this is what most fans want and expect from Bethesda titles. What we have here is a true Bethesda Game Studios RPG and one that tries a fair number of new things but is still familiar enough to make fans happy.
From designing your own spaceship to exploring the different worlds and getting involved with different groups, Starfield always throws something unexpected at you, and if not for the lacklustre ship-to-ship combat and space travel, it could have potentially been the perfect game. It is unfortunate that the visuals are held back by the limitations of the Creation Engine which keeps the worlds from being as big and full as they could be, but it is nonetheless clear the developers put a lot of time into making the world look and feel unique.
While many areas reuse assets, other areas and locations look different and stand out, and while many worlds are just included for resource gathering, others hold many hidden details for you to find and utilize. The music is also amazing here and the score by Inon Zur is incredible. You really feel the music play into the storytelling and that is the mark of a good video game soundtrack.
Starfield is well-optimized for PC as mentioned above, and one thing to note is that modders are already gearing up and preparing to create content for the game. With how great a canvas Bethesda Game Studios drew up here, there is a ton of potential for modders to exploit, including fixing spaceship flight and space combat and creating new worlds and areas to explore. It is very exciting to imagine what will be done and no doubt the modding scene will make Starfield a must-play title for years to come.
Starfield may not be the most revolutionary RPG out there and is held back by dated tech and design concepts, but what Bethesda Game Studios managed to create here is an incredibly fun and immersive experience that will keep you hooked for hours, even before the addition of mods. There is clearly a lot of passion in the development team and the various characters you encounter all feel alive and fully individual. The end result is the most polished Bethesda Game Studios RPG yet ( especially after the patch) and the delays in release noticeably helped the team to refine and perfect the experience. Starfield is a title that is easy to recommend and it will be interesting to see what comes next. Hopefully that’s a Bethesda Game Studios title which doesn’t use Creation Engine, which would truly unleash the full potential of the Bethesda development team.
Reviewed on PC
Disclaimer: A review key was provided
[…] 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 […]