There's a lot to say, and I don't know that I'm the person with the wherewithal to say it. After twenty five hours in-game, I think there's a lot more here to like than reviewers are giving the game credit for, but there's also plenty of little niggles that are present which I don't think are going to see significant change through iterative patches - bug fixes from Bethesda are one thing, but some of these systems could use a Serious Overhaul. I don't think it's a 'fuck it, modders will fix it' attitude as much as seeing where so many things are mapped to single keys that... yeah, this is a PC/Console release and it shows.
I'm gonna lead with the stuff that bugs me. Everybody wants the dirt first, right?
Space: The Most Narrow Frontier...
So... space travel. This is a weird one, because I love it and I hate it. The comparisons to Skyrim are kind of inevitable, but also really useful for this example. Say that I step outside the city gates of Riften while playing Skyrim. My character can now walk (and run and jump and fight and dodge and eat eighty cheese wheels) to Solitude, or Markarth, or Dawnstar - as far as the map goes, you can simply travel on foot without seeing a loading screen as you move across the landscape.
Starfield, by contrast, feels very instanced. While you can land on a planet's surface and do the big-ass wandering across an open landscape, that'll be mostly while you're hunting out resources and materials for crafting or building. Most of the action takes place in either cities or facilities like mines or research buildings or the like, which - though fairly elegant - do feel a little like they're invisibly walled in. Exploring the city of New Atlantis, for example, you can jump on public transit and go between four districts (or hell, maybe there's more I haven't found yet), but as realistic in some ways as this is, it doesn't help the feeling that instead of being a sprawling city it's really more of a collection of boxes.
From a system resource management perspective I can see why it makes perfect sense. Especially New Atlantis, which is pretty stunning - more on that later - but I won't deny that it still doesn't hit quite the same way as Skyrim's wandering from place to place. Yes, walled cities were their own instances, but the world around them felt more open.
Which brings me back around to space travel. Space itself is really more of a backdrop to the setting than the setting itself. You'll fly, fight, travel between systems... but they're a means to an end, really. Your ship is really more like your horse in RDR2 in most respects, though the interior environments are a lot of fun to explore and can be built to spec so you've got crafting stations and such with you at all times. Starfield in its truest sense is not really a space game. Star Wars, weirdly enough, springs to mind. Most of the action in Star Wars takes place on a planet, sometimes with weird environmental effects and cool set pieces. The space battles, dogfighting and blaster fire tend to be just that: short, dangerous battles that either move the action forward or leave the characters with a lingering problem that needs to be solved. Immediately after a battle we're back in the ship interiors, or planetside - space travel and combat informs the setting rather than being Star Wars, and that's how it feels in Starfield. Neat if you want to engage with it, but a little anemic if you choose to circumvent it.
But there is something I like about the space travel mechanic in Starfield so far. If you're somewhere that you can feasibly reach your ship without danger and traveling to a system or location you've already visited, you can simply bring up your map and quick travel that entire stretch with the press of a key. No ship takeoff animation, no cargo scans, just point to point transport. Which is a weird thing to like, I guess, but I appreciate that across a game with as many places to visit and reasons to jump around between planets... I don't have to watch my ship take off every time, and power up my grav drive manually, and so on. If you do quick travel constantly you miss out on some of the random 'road encounters' in open space - so far while in space I've helped a stranded class of school kids on a field trip, took a survey with the local news service, and gone aboard a lovely old woman's ship who insisted I call her grandma and just wanted some company - so just like Skyrim it's worth dusting off manually on occasion and wandering deliberately.
The UI is a Chore
It just is. I'm sorry, Bethesda, but when it was just inventory, map, powers and magic, Skyrim was already groaning under the weight of its UI. Starfield really only adds to this weight, and there's not much avoiding it.
Also, while I dig the insistence on the cassettepunk, NASA-lite, you read both Andy Weir's books aesthetic, the in-game UI on crafting tables, research benches and similar is outright atrocious. I have little to no idea at any given moment what's available and what's greyed out, or what materials I need to progress... it's just kinda ass. The system UI I can forgive being kludgy because it's gotta work with a controller, but the in-game crafting mechanics having such an impenetrable UI is a real kick in the giblets.
Which leads me to...
The Ship Designer is a Beautiful Disaster
The tutorials for pretty much everything suck ass. The ship designer is a huge feature and actually a hell of a lot of fun once you get your head around how parts fit together, but there are UI elements giving you clues about building points that have no explanation anywhere, and precisely what certain modules actually contain is a wonderful mystery that won't be wholly answered until you slap them on your ship and go take a look around inside. This is definitely where some additional pop-ups or tooltips on things would be amazing.
Thankfully, the early access period meant that by the time this mook had made their way into the game, there were already guides on what the fuck everything is. What's the difference between an All-in-One Hab and a Captain's Quarters Hab, for example? Does an Engineering Bay actually do anything for your ship? Oh, there are classes of ship upgrades, access and use of which is limited by my piloting skill? ...why did nobody tell me any of this?!
But there's good stuff, right?
Sure! For all that there are some systemic things that are irritating, the game itself is actually pretty fun. I've enjoyed my time in Starfield so far and I'm looking forward to playing a lot more to explore the nooks and crannies of places I've already seen, and to venture out into the universe further to find more.
You CAN Polish a Turd!
The very earliest echoes of Fallout 3 can still be seen in some of the elements of Starfield. Progressively, with each release of a new game, Bethesda has smoothed and buffed and polished the mechanics of actually playing the game and interacting with the world, and Starfield feels like the current pinnacle of that. It's managed to mesh some of the neat character leveling mechanics of both Skyrim and Fallout 4. I've seen criticism that the game doesn't innovate enough, but I have to ask... why? What does that actually mean? What would innovation actually look like in this space, and is there anything actually wrong with working over a known formula that's been working for decades?
I think Starfield most definitely has the disadvantage that Larian Studios just drove a D&D-shaped truck through Bethesda's sales projections, and folks that're familiar with D&D are flocking to finally, some good fucking food. I get the distinct impression they might not be familiar with how long Larian's been polishing their turd, and how iterative it is on previous games from their catalogue that don't have the D&D juggernaut license attached. Is this a bad thing? Of course not. They're in their lane, moisturized and flourishing. Have I already played Baldur's Gate 3 when it was called Divinity: Original Sin? I certainly have. But Larian's not getting the sheer level of vitriol over 'same thing again' which, to be perfectly honest, I don't think Bethesda necessarily deserves for Starfield's iterative approach.
Or, to paraphrase another wonderful comment I wish I could properly cite, "You don't get mad at a cake for having flour, eggs, butter, and sugar." Bethesda have a cake they like, and I like the Bethesda cakes. I've also dropped 50 hours on the latest Larian cake, too, for comparison's sake.
There are little things that I like about the way that everything's been carefully honed. One example is that looting and most small containers works the same way as it has in Fallout 4 and others; you hover over the object, you get an inventory screen, you quickly grab the contents you want and go on your merry way. But bigger containers like lockers, fridges, weapons cases and the like actually require that you open them, and the loot will be sitting in there as an in-world item you can pick up. I love that. It's a little extra tactile thing which makes it fun to interact with the world and actually spend time exploring things rather than just mousing over huge areas of level to quickly scan for toys.
If Ridley Scott made one video game...
Another common criticism I've seen from people is that the game is visually dull, uninspired, or something along those lines. I'm genuinely not sure if we're looking at the same game, or if these people possess eyes which operate in the visible spectrum of light. I just... don't get it? I've been to four major worlds so far and a decent scattering of the random encounters like abandoned bases and mining outposts and such, and while it's true that the 'dungeon' designs tend to all draw from the same pool of textures, the worlds I've been to look wildly different to one another. I quite like the aesthetic of the spaceborne gear and the insistence that everything should look realistic in the sense that it should look as if you could pick it up and feasibly understand how it operates, but the idea that the whole game is painted in the same brush is just bizarre to me.
If I just steal a few pop culture references for examples, you basically start in The Martian, travel to Demolition Man, skip on over to Bladerunner and wander Total Recall for a while. The civilian gear and clothing looks pretty stylish, while the military, space trucker, miner and other gear looks like it fits the description of any of those immediately.
I like the way the game looks and I quite honestly don't understand people calling it bland. That one's a matter of opinion, of course, so if the visual style doesn't do it for you that's totally fair. I just think it's cool as hell.
I still don't know how artificial gravity works, though.
It's fun?
It's not groundbreaking, sure, but it's entertaining. It's a nice, warm soup of a game with a few chunks of really tender meat in the broth. I'm enjoying it thoroughly, despite the things that are irritating me about it. Some of those things might get patched or updated - and I am hoping for a few optimization patches - but it's something new presented in a way which feels comfortingly familiar. The universe is interesting, and I've enjoyed chatting to NPCs and reading news snippets, books and loading screen tidbits about the Settled Systems. While I love Oblivion and Skyrim both (for different reasons, to be sure) there's no denying that despite being set in the world of the Elder Scrolls, they're very safe bets - medieval-esque, human-centric regions of a world which we've seen in Morrowind can be way more interesting.
Slowly peeling back the layers to find what's under the visuals of the setting has actually been really satisfying. I think a little of this ties into the tactile nature of the gameplay - what I mentioned about rummaging physically through lockers and containers feels kinda similar to what I enjoy about how the universe itself is actually being revealed. I can go look for it and enjoy stewing in the pot with the rest of the ingredients, or I can blaze past them and complain the soup is tasteless.
On the whole, I think it's a game that will be satisfying if you're willing to meet it at what it is, rather than being annoyed it's not No Man's Sky which has had seven years of development since release. If Starfield just doesn't excite you, that's totally fair. There's been a couple of really neat sci-fi wow moments that I don't want to spoil, but they're reasonably few and far between. The game so far isn't pushing any boundaries but what's there is nice. If you've been put off by press coverage and the loudest reviews sneering at one thing or another to generate more revenue clicks, take a look at some of the Steam reviews from people that are actually playing it. 78% positive impression on a game like this is pretty good, I'd say.
What bugs?
I know that strictly speaking we shouldn't be praising a company for releasing a product that works. But, like... there are so many moving parts in a video game, I can't reasonably picture a game of this scope releasing without a few. Baldur's Gate 3 spent years in early access ironing out bugs with player feedback, and I've still had a few weird ones crop up. In 25 hours of Starfield I've had two CTDs and that's it. Seriously. I've seen plenty of comments about truly bizarre bugs, but I just haven't had that experience - again I'm left wondering how much of this is just amplified hate mail for ad revenue, despite having a kernel of truth at the core. When it was mentioned this would be the most polished, bug-free release of Bethesda's to date? Honestly? Yeah, it feels that way.
So, in summary...
It's definitely worth picking up in a sale. Is it worth getting right now? Enh. That's really up to you to decide. If you wanted it but were put off by negative coverage, I'd personally suggest to hold your nose and click the purchase button. I've really been enjoying the game. It wears its inspiration on its sleeve rather than trying to play coy about where it's picking up set dressing from, and the mechanics - short of the UI - are satisfying and fun to play around with.
I think I'm going to be in this one for a while.
