Before came out, I found myself asking friends if they were going to be playing it. I wasn’t particularly hyped about it, but I like to talk about the games I’m playin🥂g with other people, and I knew I’d be playing it for work regardless of my personal excitement. I was expecting at least a handful of people to take to the stars alongside me, but to my surprise, nobody seemed particularly excited. One even told me, “I don’t know, Bethesda games have a lot of fetch quests. I’d rather keep playing .” Same, friend. Same.
is well-known for its fetch quests, it’s true, but I was holding out hope that Starfield would have a bit more depth to its missions. When I play RP🐷Gs, I’m interested in characters and story progression, not rewards – the kill and loot gameplay loop doesn’t usually work for me because I simply do not care about getting the most powerful items possible in any game.
Baldur’s Gate 3 scratches this itch wonderfully because the entire game is story-driven. It is, after all, modelled on a campaign, which is famously built on campaigns and quality storytelling. From the game’s beginning, you are pushed to explore new areas with a clear intention – to get that damn tad🎶pole-leech thing out of your sk♕ull.
Even when it’s not directly related to saving your own life, there is always a motive behind what you’re doing, whether that be infiltrating a goblin camp to save a druid, hunting for infernal iron to fuel your tiefling girlfriend's chest engine, or getting on a strange boat to free some enslaved gnomes. You always know why what you’re doing serves a purpose, and, more importantly, that it does matter. Everything you do in Baldur’s Gate 3 matters, just by nature of how every decision impacts your story🎃line in some wa𒉰y.
Starfield, though, is lacking in motivation. It’s all predicated on a mystery: what exactly are these Artifacts you’re collecting? I still don’t know because I’m fairly early on, and the game isn’t ready to tell me the answer yet. Instead, it is sending me to various planets 𓆏across the galaxy, chasing down leads so I can inevitably find some sort of cave, enter to find a piece of metal stuck in a rock, carve it out with my cutter, and pick it up to bring back to The Lodge. I don’t know why I’m doing all this, and I don’t think I really care. I’ve heard that the reveal is great, but at this point, I’m not sure if I’m ever going to get there.
What’s more, every quest feels equally futile. A shady guy in an el♚ectronics store sent me to the Red Mile to pick up a package for him, which is typical for Bethesda – a quest will bring you to a place you otherwise wouldn’t have found on your own, and unlock ꦅmore stuff you may or may not get stuck in. Sure, I found a vague sense of enjoyment in wandering around the Red Mile and talking to people, but in the end, when I brought that weird package back to the store, all I got was access to his weapons store, which didn’t have anything particularly interesting or valuable. Even worse, it didn’t advance the story or add any world-building or character development. I ended up dissatisfied and disappointed, yet again.
So much of Starfield feels pointless – the outpost-building, the pirate-murdering, the planet-surveying, the countless empty planets and dead space rocks I can land on, it’s all just there. There are so many ways to waste your time doing nothing, and none of them are eve💞n remotely interesting or fun. The more time I sink into Starfield, the more I want to go back to Baldur’s Ga🐭te 3 and do quests that actually feel like they mean something. For all I know, in a week, I just might.