Starfield Review: One Small Step For RPGs, One Giant Leap For Bethesda

You’re floating through space in a ship that cost you a quarter of a million credits. You’ve upgraded💟 its automated turret-mounted weapons to essentially fight for you, and no opponent – whether pirate, law enforcement, or else – can touch you. The universe expands before you, billions of stars forming rippling clouds and cosmic waves crashing into each other. The possibilities are endless, but all you can think about is the paralysing choice in front of you. Such an expansive universe is all well and good, but wh🦩at’s the point of exploring it without friends by your side?

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield is not the game you expect. In many ways, it’s an evolution of everything Bethesda has done before, in some ways it’s Skyrim in space, but in others it’s the exact opposite. Starfield is simultaneously an evolution of the classic Bethesda formula and a subversion of my every expect𝄹ation, f🐟or better and for worse.

It starts off slow. You’re a miner sent to retrieve an odd protrusion of metal from the depths of an undergro🔯und cavern on an unknown planet. You ride a lift to reach it, a little reminiscent of that unskippable Skyrim opening on the cart. You bought this game to travel the stars, not be trapped in a mine shaft elevator. And yet, the opening hours of Starfield want to hamstring you at every turn, whether through obnoxious encumbrance weights forcing you to walk at a snail’s pace or sending you on dull fetch quests before you can begin adventuring proper.

Here, I urge you to eschew Bethesda tradition and follow the main quest, or join a faction for their unique missions and plentiful perks and loot. Yes, we all want to explore the universe, but it&r🐠squo;s easy to get lost in the expanse of space, and st𒆙umble across four or five lifeless planets in a row and feel a little underwhelmed by it all. If you’re helping out the brave explorers of Constellation, however, or trying to work your way up the ranks of one of the game’s five joinable power groups, all of your interactions and explorations are more curated, more exciting, and more purposeful. It removes much of the lifeless frustration that otherwise holds Starfield back in its early hours, even if it requires you to fight against your every instinct and walk a linear path forward.

Starfield shines in the main missions. I did say that it subverted my expectations, and travelling with a companion by your side and a quest marker to focus on is far superior to going off on your own. A lot of this is due to the strength of the characters themselves, who are so😼me of the most memorable that Bethesda has written in decades. The writing is stellar (pun intended), the characters have depth, and the little quests you can undertake to grow closer to them create unbreakable bonds with all your allies.

Quests themselves are great too, after another slow start. Most recruiters want you to comply with a few simple (read: boring) tasks before coming on board𝓡 to their organisation, but it’s worth your while. I played as a pirate of the Crimson Fleet, but I can’t wait to hit New Game+ as an employee of a different, potentially more law-abiding organisation to see where exactly in the universe these new factions will take me.

After they’ve warmed up, the quests themselves are fantastic. Whether you’re searching for the secrets of the universe in the main story, raiding banks and taking heads like me, or embarking on the stories of one of the game’s other factions, you’re in for a treat. The stories head in bold and unexpected directions, and there’s o꧂ne particular mission near the end of the main quest that might be my favourite first-person sci-fi sequence since Titanfall 2’s Effects and Cause. I won’t spoil anything, but when your mission log pops up saying ‘Entangled’, get ready for the ride of your life.

You’re presented with💮 a few ‘classic Bethesda’ choices during these missions – Megaton nuke decisions, as I like to call them – where both options seem equally awful but you’re forced to choose one anyway. These are as difficult to contend with as ever, and are us💮ed infrequently enough to keep their power.

I thoroughly enjoyed the excellent science fiction story Starfield told, lapping up the gobbledegook faux-science explanations and starry shenanigans with glee. The only downside is that too many missions devolve into shootouts, with little or no other options at your disposal. If you’re roleplaying a stealth build or, like me, have invested all your points into spaceship upgrade𝓡s, tough luck. Hope you brought your shotgun.

Storytelling aside, there are plenty of elements that feel like an evolution of Bethesda’s classic RPG style. Lockpickiღng is a more involved minigame that actually challenges you a little, and upgrading your skills requires completing tasks in addition to levelling up. Want to give your spaceship better weapons systems? You better start shooting down enemies, pal. This not only helps you to understand which skills you use the most, but stops you from immediately min-maxin𝔉g your character and forces some difficult roleplaying decisions.

Base building is better than Fallout 4, but it’s not quite The Sims yet. There are hundreds of options at your disposal, which all snap into place nicely so you can build anything from towering military complexes, to sprawling science research stations. You’ll need a lot of materials to make your dreams a reality, but sending companions to tend nutrient-ri🎃ch planets can result in a steady stream of resources coming in the other direction too. Sadly, shipbuilding is far more finicky and I didn’t find it fun at all, despite leaning into a pilot playthrough. Upgrading your systems is simple and I’m sure some people will put their heads down into the nitty gritty of the building system to create beautiful craft from scratch, but the controls are unintuitive and instructions confusing.

Where Star⛎field falls down most, however, is in its core premise: exploration. While the expanse of space always looks stunning, planets are often lifeless and dull. Players are worried about not being able to explore entire planets from their landing point when the gam🍷e launches, but trust me, you won’t want to. POIs range from small research stations to caves, and few are particularly interesting, visually, mechanically, or thematically. Named locations and curated planets are where the real love has gone onto, and that much is clear in every quest, character, and town you encounter.

There are occasional side quests that you can stumble across while exploring the cosmos, and they’re fantastic. Helping beleaguered terraformers or hunting down unwanted aggressors devolve into interesting and unexpected self-contained tales that are incredibly satisfying to complete. You’ll often find yoursel♛f in an abandoned mech graveyard or amongst an illegal group of settlers, and love every minute. The problem is, these side quests are too few and far between. 900 planets is too many, and the cracks in Bethesda’s procedural generation quickly start to show.

For example, I once raided two identical Va’ruun space shuttles parked next to each other. I understand wanting similar themes within a faction, but these two were carbon copies, right down to the enemies within and the placements of cꦬoffee cups on their tables in the mess. It really took me out of the ﷽game, and annoyed me a little bit. These are details that shouldn’t be overlooked in a game of this scale.

I was really disappointed in Starfield’s exploration. The only way to land on planets or dock to space stations is by pre♓ssing ‘X’ and watching a cutscene. Travelling between planets or galaxies can only be achieved by fast travel, and you can practically get anywhere you want without upgrading your grav engines at all – you just might need to make a few stops in between. On top of all that, planets themselves are overwhelmingly boring, with disappointing textures to boot. Lush, inhabited planets fare the best on the looks front, but the lack of interesting POIs still made me reluctant to explore.

Many will be interested in that classic Bethesda bugginess, and I'm happy to report that it wasn't bad. The framerate chugs on the monorail cutscene that allows you to fast travel within New Atlantis and one NPC appeared wearing only his pants, but I had two major crashes back to my home screen in about 75 hours of playtime, which is good going for the studio.

Cities are the opposite: huge multi-layered hubs of activity with an almost paralysing amount of things to do. You can spend hours roaming any of the game’s sprawli💙ng civilisations, talking to people, and figuring out what life’s like in this corner of the universe. NPCs are a little archaic – they often feel like set dressing rather than real ch༺aracters with real places to go – but the places they inhabit are a testament to everything Bethesda does well. I found new areas of New Atlantis, the first city you visit, as far as 40 hours into my playthrough, and spent another hour gawking at the entire region hidden away from the tourist’s haunts.

There’s a lot to love about Starfield, and it fares best when it steps away from Bethesda’s archaic formula. The story is exceptional, faction squabbles ar🤪e inviting, and space battles are mechanical and catastrophic. Redirecting all power from shields to missile launchers and launching a surprise counteroffensive while orbiting Saturn made me feel like a proper Starfleet captain, and deserves special mention.

Starfield is all about the stories it tells, and it tells them well. The central narrative and the characters inhabiting it are some of the best that Bethesda has 💜ever produced, but they’re unfortunately let down by the banalitꦡy that so often surrounds them. I came into Starfield wanting to explore the stars, and I got a brilliant sci-fi story instead. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed.