Mike Parilla

With just over 96 hours in game and having completed the main story and spent a good chunk of time in New Game+, I wanted to write down some thoughts I had on Starfield.

First off, bravo Bethesda for delivering your most ambitious game yet. To be this large and this detailed is a testament to your ability for world building and lore. That being said, there were many things I thoroughly enjoyed and other things that left me wanting more.

To start, the hyperspace hijinks I encountered were incredible.

• Weighing in on the political strife between the ‘Societies’ on Charybdis 3 was probably the most fun mission progression I’ve had in a Bethesda game, it’s certainly among some of the greats like Vault Gary in Fallout 3 and Whodunit in Oblivion.
• Randomly running into The Valentine’s Space Shanties was a great touch, pretty sure that was the voice of Nathan Evans, which was pretty awesome to encounter in the expanse of space
• The absolutely deranged Mantis mission arc leading to a pretty sweet loot cache was also very fun, especially listening through all of the audio logs to find the grisly end to some of the people seeking the ‘Secret Base!’.

I think the writing for Starfield was a far step above what we saw in both Skyrim and Fallout 4, and the move back to the unvoiced protagonist was an excellent return to form for role players everywhere. And to top it off, the starship building system has been phenomenal, I have spent far too much time working on getting my ships juuust right. With New Game+, I took my lumps from learning this system to build the gem of my fleet, the Palarran.

With all of that being said, there were some things that I had gripes with:

• I think it’s very hard to make an open world game with multiple worlds when traversal between those worlds is done through UIs. Part of the reason Skyrim’s exploration worked was because you could get enveloped in it’s beauty and just enjoy the process of exploring, a lot of that is lost completely in Starfield, and it makes it harder to lose yourself and feel part of that universe, which is sad.

• I wish the local map was still an option in Starfield; for the first several hours in New Atlantis I had no idea how to get to the Well, I only eventually made it there in the Constellation missions where I was running for my life. I feel like if local map was still there, it would be a lot easier to navigate through the more dense, urban areas.

• Some of the smaller moons and planets can feel a little too samey once you find the same “Abandoned Outpost” prefab and you know exactly where to look for the best loot in that building. With a few more variants in the rotation for loot maybe this would feel a bit better. This part of the procedural content generation detracts from the environmental story telling which Bethesda was known for (from the “Fuck You” door to the skeletons in Fallout caught in their final moments)
• Base building is as wide as the ocean but as deep as a wading pool; I wish there was more depth in the kind of customization you can make to your base. With three distinct space fantasy flavors of architecture in Neon, New Atlantis and Akila City, its a shame that you cannot make your base reflective of any of those art styles to show off your player’s flair. In this respect, Starfield has certainly regressed compared to Bethesda’s most recent game, Fallout 76.

Overall, this is a solid game. Although I am more partial to traditional fantasy role playing games and not as much into sci-fi games, this game scratches that balance between the now and the not so distant future in a grounded way (not to unlike Star Trek Enterpise) and I plan on spending quite a bit more time settling the Olympus System, exploring the myriad planets, enjoying the community mods made for the game and adventuring through the black drink for years to come.