Starfield review: Bethesda sterilizes the final frontier

The following are some alternatives to the word “Advantage” Starfield, Bethesda’s ambition has exceeded its craft.

It’s difficult to speak definitively when discussing a game like this, a role-playing epic about exploring an infinite expanse. A player may decide to become a pirate, earn as much as they can, and then embark on an exciting new ship in order to explore the limits of space. One player might apply for a position with the Ryujin Industries corporate group, which has influence over every colony, to rise up the ranks. Meanwhile, I enjoy Starfield most when I’m able to piddle around for hours delivering coffee orders, taxiing people around the solar system, and assisting in scientific research.

This is what I mean by saying Starfield is vast. Though I’ve played nearly 50 hours of the game during the pre-release review period, I’ve reached a tiny fraction of its supposed 1,000 planets. I’ve collected every artifact, infiltrated a pirate crew as an undercover narc (against my will), fancied up my spaceship, run errands for random people, and searched for resources on barren planets. On the new planets that humans have fled to after escaping a devastated Earth, there is so much work to be done and people to meet. But despite all the vastness of space, there is still a lot to do. StarfieldThe film is often sterile and tepid, and its finest moments are buried under so much tedium.

StarfieldTodd Howard is the director of this game, which has taken eight years to develop. You’ll find atmospheric places and compelling stories amid the bespoke planets and procedurally generated environments, but too many of Bethesda’s vistas feel like a homogenized version of space. Yes, there are certain moments. Starfield that celebrate the strangeness, glory, and power of life across the cosmos — but there’s just as much lifelessness.

in a screenshot from Starfield, the camera looks into a space station from overhead, through a glass dome; a man is sitting at a table surrounded by lots of equipment

Starfield’s main quest line puts me in cahoots with Constellation, an intrepid and infamous group of space explorers bent on tracking down mysterious artifacts that have an unknown power. It’s a hunt that takes me — an explorer and empath who’s burdened by an overeager reply guy, in keeping with a trait I selected before embarking on my journey — to a bunch of different planets across a couple of solar systems, leaving dead pirates and other space bad guys in my wake. You can recruit new followers both as your ship’s crewmates and as exploration companions. You’ll often find potential crew members, with varying skills, lingering around populated settlements, equally intent on finding an excuse to soar into space and leave their lives behind.

StarfieldThere are several hubs in the game: the dusty Wild West Akila City on Akila, Neon on Volii Alpha, The Key on Jemison (a pirate-infested space station), and New Atlantis on Jemison. As with Winterhold and Vivec City prior to them, they are the source of various faction missions and side-stories. Crucially, though, they’re singular points of interest on planets that are much larger and much emptier beyond the city walls.

The following are some of the ways to get in touch with us. You can find out more about this by clicking here.There are many exciting things you can find on the outer edges (and further out). But more often than not, these swaths of land simply hold an abandoned research station, or a cave that’s overrun by pirates or religious zealots. These places aren’t inherently uninteresting in their own right, but when you’ve come across a half dozen of them already, and gunned down said inhabitants time and time again, the scenarios start to blend together.

New Atlantis is the first city you see. It’s a tight-lipped utopia, similar to Epcot, that conceals the inequality below the surface. The poor literally live beneath the streets. The first person I spoke to after disembarking from the city’s tram system was a sanitation worker. The stranger told me she was tired. She said that she wanted a break so she could grab some coffee. The option was there for me: I ran over to the nearest kiosk to grab her coffee. There was no meaningful reward aside from the little spark of joy in doing something kind for someone — even a minor character planted outside of the tram for a bit of flavor when you step into the bustle of the city. It’s a tiny, fleeting moment in a game all about vastness and infinity, but it was personal. It felt human. And it was a far cry from New Atlantis’ otherwise anodyne, corporate vibes, which I suspect may be intentional — an extension of the promised perfect life in space, away from the destruction found on Earth.

in a screenshot from Starfield, a spaceship is parked on a landing area in a futuristic city called New Atlantis

After a few days, I was able to dive into the chaos of city streets where people shouted out local news and gave me tips, just before the same activities were reported in one of Starfield’s many, many menus. I interacted with quest givers in the most artificial way possible — that is, with all of humanity removed from the equation. If my handy watch hadn’t notified me that I now had new quests to complete, I wouldn’t have even known.

It doesn’t help that StarfieldIt kills the majority of its momentum, and the artificiality keeps me away from some of its best moments. My campaign was halted dozens of time because I couldn’t keep up with the pace of my story. Starfield’s overwhelming menus. There are quick-save sLots of people are interested in buying them for weapons, but if you run out of ammo or need a weapon that’s not saved, there will be lotsFlipping back and forward through multiple layers is a lot easier than flicking between screens. It’s also a real slog to jump from planet to planet via Starfield’s menus, halted by jump limits, fuel levels, and all sorts of other numbers just trying to find a barren rock floating in space, before doing it all over again. Space travel Starfield It is a sequence of loading screens.

But the question remains: Starfield Can feel insipid, in a manner that must You can also check out our other blog posts.Be intentional. The last time I looked at my interest in Starfield for the first 15 hours of my campaign, completing fetch quests for Constellation and hopping from derivative handcrafted planets to procedurally generated spaces of “not much.” In those 15 hours, I didn’t find many more of the small delights that delivering coffee brought me, nor did I find many incidental threads to pull; instead, I largely grav-jumped across planets pockmarked by abandoned mines, in which I had to plow through hordes of gunslingers to grow my pile of loot. In these crucial early hours of the game, where it’s essential to hook a player, StarfieldThe game follows the same standard loop that I’ve seen in many places before: kill everything you see, and then go collect what you want. For all of the game’s invocations of wonder and discovery, I rarely felt as if I was discovering anything wonderful.

One time, while I was aimlessly gravity-jumping in order to qualify for the next upgrade, a moment of wonder occurred. I soon found a massive ship hovering within a planet’s orbit, but there was no way to communicate with it from the surface; turns out, it was a vessel that left Earth 200 years ago. The people on the ship, generations that had lived and died within the confines of its hull, believed themselves to be alone in the world, the only survivors of Earth’s demise. Forget about a minor activity; that’s a storyline that’s interesting enough to hang an entire game on. These types of adventures are what I would like to experience more often. Starfield, and maybe I’ll find them eventually — but maybe I won’t.

in a screenshot from Starfield, an astronaut — a tiny speck in the bottom right corner of a wide vista — stands on a rock outcropping, looking toward a tower capped by a golden geodesic sphere, with an orange ringed planet looming large in the background

Since Bethesda Game Studios started work eight years ago, blockbuster videogames have gotten more complex and expensive. Starfield. In that time, we’ve seen a handful of studios try to make “the ultimate game,” one that can be whatever the player wants it to be. StarfieldA cloudy space is created between the infinite infinity. No Man’s SkyThe handcrafted brilliance Tears of the Kingdom – The Legend of Zelda. To convey that elusive feeling of immenseness, Starfield, Bethesda’s Pete Hines claimed that the game doesn’t even begin until you’ve finished the main quest. It’s a game I started before the main quest, whether it was a brief encounter with a stranger who loved coffee, or a heist during a space voyage, or an accidently foray through the halls of a ship where generations of passengers had thought humanity lost hope, but found that the human race survived. But Starfield buries these adventures so deep beneath layers of artificiality and behind stalled momentum that they’ve become lost in all of this “ultimate game.”

StarfieldExists in the tension that exists between a meticulously crafted planet and the immenseness of procedurally-generated worlds. Bethesda was adamant about the importance of procedural planet generation. You can find out more about us by clicking here.The expanse of the universe has a profound impact on humankind. The vast expanse of Starfield’s world leaves gaps unfilled, and Bethesda has opted instead to simply spread further, rather than flesh out what’s already there.

The following are some alternatives to the word “Advantage” StarfieldBethesda is putting all its effort into exploring outer space’s dark corners. It has also drained me of the humanity that I had hoped to discover in the wake. It is impossible to achieve everything. StarfieldObfuscates the most intriguing mysteries.

Starfield Early access begins on September 1. Microsoft supplied a Microsoft pre-release code to be used on Xbox Series X for the review. Vox Media is affiliated with other companies. Vox Media can earn affiliate commissions, but this does not affect editorial content. This is where you can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.