Starfieldwas released a year ago amid breathless excitement, and I was right in the middle of it. I’ve always had a soft spot for Bethesda games - I’m embarrassed to say how many collective hours I have inSkyrim,Oblivion, and the laterFalloutgames, but I will tell you the number has a comma in it. I’ve suffered the slings and arrows of navigatingMorrowind, gone through the trials and tribulations of running my ownElder Scrolls Onlineguild, and experienced the highs and lows of playingStarfieldsince day one.
It’s been a year sinceStarfieldlaunched, and I’ve sunk a fair amount of time into it. It doesn’t come close to rivaling myFallout 4orOblivionplaytimes, mind, but I’ve seen a great deal of what the galaxy has to offer. I’ve also seen how fan expectations have shapedStarfield, how it’s changed over time to deliver on them. So, after all this time, and with theShattered SpaceDLC on the way, I have to ask myself -wasStarfieldeverything I wanted and more?
“An Instant Classic”: Starfield Review
Starfield has plenty of captivating tales and dynamic mechanics that make it an epic science fiction adventure - and an instant classic.
Bethesda (& Its Fans) Set Impossible Standards For Starfield
Earlier Games & Lofty Marketing Set A High Bar
Bethesda has a reputation for putting out huge, immersive RPGs. It’s not undeserved. Consider how groundbreaking the open-world sandbox ofMorrowindwas in its day, or howFallout 3irreversibly altered the trajectory of the franchise. When it began advertisingStarfield, it deliberately drew on that reputation.All the early marketing for the game equated playingStarfieldto actually traveling across the stars; in a pre-release interview withThe New York Times, managing director Ashley Cheng addressed concerns aboutStarfield’s mostly barren, procedurally generated planets with the now-infamous phrase, “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.”
But frankly, in recent years,Bethesda’s output has stagnated. After the landmark success ofOblivionandSkyrim, every game studio and their mothers started doing the same exact thing as Bethesda: making big, open-world games full of an endless supply of stuff to do. The open-world craze is still in its death throes today - developers and players alike are finally starting to embrace more linear structures, especially in our currentage of the Soulslike.
So, in the last decade or so, there have been near-infinite open world games. A few have stuck around, mainly because they’ve done something new with the genre, or fused other proven concepts with the generic open world formula (thinkZelda: Breath of the WildorElden Ring). But in the meantime, Bethesda has always just been Bethesda. It uses an updated version of the exact game engine it used forSkyrimalmost 15 years ago - not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but it goes to show thatBethesda’s games have gotten samey.
Starfield Weapon Oversight Is Finally Being Added In Shattered Space DLC
Starfield’s Shattered Space DLC is introducing a lot of impressive game-changing features, including one that could entirely revamp a weapon.
And yet, a lot of fans have still come to expect every Bethesda game to be as immersive, detailed, and revolutionary asOblivion. My expectations, meanwhile, have been tempered sinceFallout 4.Bethesda games have become my guilty pleasure. I knew almost immediately thatFallout 4wouldn’t change my life asNew Vegashad, but I recognized that it was perfectly good for a quick dopamine hit. I’d log on after a long day, play a couple of hours, complete a couple of missions, and log off. I enjoyed the time I spent playing it, but scarcely thought about it after I’d shut the game off.
After the disaster ofFallout 76’s launch and a long period of radio silence from Bethesda, I set my expectations forStarfieldlow. All I asked was that it could fill the same niche thatFallout 4had for me - if it somehow exceeded that, I’d be pleasantly surprised. And in that way,Starfieldreally was exactly what I expected it to be. I would log onto it when I didn’t have the brainpower to play anything else, explore a few of its planets, and move on. I’ve enjoyed my time with it, and continue to do so, but I scarcely think about it after I shut the game off. And that’s all I ever wanted from it: a distraction.
Starfield Has Gotten Better Over Time, But Still Has Its Flaws
The Rev-8 Is Great, But Is It Enough?
That said, I can still acknowledge thatStarfieldhas many inherent flaws, and doesn’t always live up to its own promises. First and foremost is its greatest disappointment: thelack of truly free-roam space travel. That was one way in whichStarfieldunambiguously let me down. I’ve always been enchanted by games that use unique modes of travel to ferry players between distinct areas: the pirate ships ofAssassin’s Creed: Black Flag, the Gummi ships ofKingdom Hearts, the starships ofNo Man’s Sky. While it is possible to customize your ship and take it out on limited excursions inStarfield, these are usually just brief combat missions. The actual space travel is relegated to a handful of loading screens.
When banking on immersion akin to an actual trip into space, this kind of interruption is a no-go. It takes players out of the moment; when a loading screen pops up, they’re left staring at their own reflections on a black screen, not marveling at the vast, desolate expanses of space. There are ways to hide these things behind in-game effects, which can be a little more engaging, butStarfieldseems to have left this completely off the table.
I’m Hoping One Aspect Of Starfield: Shattered Space Doesn’t Let Me Down
Starfield: Shattered Space is slated to release at the end of September, and a lot is riding on one aspect that Bethesda must perfect.
Other player critiques focus onthe barren repetitiveness ofStarfield’s space- part design choice, due to its depiction of a mostly uncolonized galaxy, and part technological necessity, due to the constraints of procedural planet generation. Either way, there are a lot of missed opportunities inStarfield’s level design. The overall lack of hand-crafted areas does detract from my enjoyment somewhat. I did enjoy the environmental storytelling other Bethesda games attempted in their dungeon design. And they often had a better proliferation of meaningful loot, as opposed toStarfield’s smattering of procedurally generated guns and mostly useless crafting materials.
Thankfully,this has improved greatly with the simple introduction of the Rev-8 land rover. Now, if I come across a cave I know I’ve seen before, I can just drive past it. If the next major point of interest is half a planet away, I can get there much more quickly. The Rev-8 almost - but not quite - gives me what I actually wanted out ofStarfield’s space travel. It makes the process of traveling between distinct landmarks more interesting, if only marginally. It can’t quite compare to the majesty of accurately simulated space travel, but it’s a major improvement across the board, and demonstrates that Bethesda is responding to player feedback.
A similar change that also seems to indicate an awareness of player feedback isStarfield’s earlier map update. The game’s surface maps were initially unreadable - simple dot matrices occasionally punctuated by POI markers. After extensive player criticism, these maps were scrapped in favor of simple aerial views, which made navigating cities infinitely easier. Between this, innumerable bug fixes, and the introduction of the Rev-8,Starfieldhas shown immense improvement since launch - andthere’s another major update on the way.
Starfield’s Shattered Space DLC Could Give Me More Of What I Want
More Hand-Crafted Environments & A Horror-Tinged Story
Starfieldis poised to get evenbetter with the release ofShattered Space, its first DLC. Focusing on House Va’ruun, one of the base game’s greatest mysteries,Shattered Spaceis expected to have a horror slant as players contact otherworldly beings and ghosts from a shadowy past. While this DLC will inevitably come with numerous updates to the base game’s content, potentially fixing some of its ongoing issues, it’ll also include one of the things thatStarfieldneeds most:more hand-crafted content.
I still have hundreds of procedurally generated planets left to explore, but I’m ready for something truly different, andShattered Spacecould be the final pushStarfieldneedsto rivalSkyrimandFallout 4in terms of the open-world exploration I crave.
In the most general sense, no,Starfieldhasn’t lived up to most players' expectations. Many set the bar too high, but it’s not their fault -Starfield’s marketing did promise a lot it ultimately couldn’t deliver. But for me, the casual Bethesda fan, it was almost everything I wanted it to be, offering seemingly endless opportunities for (occasionally flawed) exploration. It’s shown many signs of improvement in the past year, and has further potential with the release ofShattered Spacelater this month.Starfieldmay have had a rough first year, but with a DLC on the way, and new expansions planned after that, it’s likely here to stay for a long while.
Source:The New York Times
Starfield
Bethesda Game Studios presents Starfield - the first original IP from the studio in twenty-five-plus years. Set in the year 2310, the United Colonies and Freestar Collective are observing a shaky truce after a war set 20 years prior. The player will customize their character as a member of a space exploration team called Constellation while navigating The Settled Systems and the conflicts between the warring factions. According to Bethesda, players can explore over 100 systems and 1000 planets to find resources and build their ships, living out their own sci-fi journeys.
