“The wonder is not that the field of stars is so vast, but that we have measured it”: Review of Starfield

In the year 2330, humanity has settled into space far and wide after escaping an uninhabitable Earth in 2050. On the moon Vectera you work for Argos Mining extracting minerals deep underground. Your humble career takes a turn when you discover an enigmatic artifact and witness a vision before passing out. Upon waking you get unceremoniously shoved onboard a starship headed to New Atlantis to explain the details of your rock touching – induced hallucinations to a group of space explorers called Constellation. Your journey in Starfield begins…

You are recruited into Constellation, and your mission becomes to find more artifacts and in doing so, solve humanity’s greatest mystery. Typically to a Bethesda game, you will get distracted hundreds of times while chasing the main questline. Side quests and missions introduce you to countless hours of exploration, scheming, helping, collecting, and talking your way out of trouble – and I love every minute of it. I unashamedly adore every single side quest in Starfield. Whether I’m looking for books for a collector in Akila City or solving a murder in Neon’s filthy alleyways, I couldn’t be happier. The stories NPC’s tell whisk me away every time, and the greatest mystery of mankind will have to wait a while longer.

Amidst the innumerable quests to complete, Starfield is bursting with other ways to spend your time: from cooking, crafting, starship building, outpost managing all the way to decorating your choice of home among the stars. Fans of Fallout 4 (2015) and Fallout 76 (2018) will recognize many features in the game; certainly the 1800+ hours I’ve spent in FO76 eased my way into Starfield’s mechanics. Facing all these systems can be a bit intimidating, but just taking things one at a time and not worrying about playing in the most ‘effective’ way makes life a little easier.

Getting lost in space has never been quite so enchanting: I’ll happily spend hours whizzing around some random lifeless ice planet, constantly stopping just to take in scenery. Every planet, no matter how barren, feels so vivid, so tangible in ways I could never explain. After hours upon hours of exploration, I’ve only visited a measly 46 of the game’s 1692 planets – and I’m constantly itching to see the next.

 

While travelling you will meet different factions, all of them with supposedly different takes on how the universe(s) should run. Unfortunately, many of them blend together after a while: you’ve got space pirates, space cops and space cops in cowboy hats (the cowboy hats are really cool, though). You can choose to join most of the factions if you so wish (I recommend the space cowboys myself), but becoming friends with the bad guys will make your companions hate you. You can be as evil as you wish, but there’s not much consequence for doing so: even mass murder will just land you a bounty that’s easily paid off.  At times it’s difficult to see if my actions had much influence on anything other than how much my companions like me.

Of these companions, only four can be romanced and eventually married. The options are lukewarm at best: two are hung up on ex-partners, the third is confused whether the person she’s still pining for even was a partner and the fourth has some intense hang-ups regarding her space snake worship-based religion.

Starfield is by no means perfect. Sometimes NPC’s will ogle at you strangely, get stuck in walls, mold together with a plastic box they stepped on, or spin endlessly in place. Yes, your carefully decorated apartment might reset entirely, making you lose every single piece of equipment, crafting material, outfit, food, and other miscellaneous thing you had the audacity to store there. Yes, corpses will sometimes reanimate only to knock everything in the room over a few times and then return to the afterlife. And if you love opening doors and endless loading screens, this is definitely the game for you.

What Starfield is, is an RPG: you need to bring life to it from yourself, to mold the story and people within to vivify the world you’re in. In the end Starfield is a Bethesda RPG through and through. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, however, is up to you to decide.

 

Basic info

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Release date: 6.11. 2023
Platform(s): Windows, Xbox Series X/S
Genres: Action RPG
PEGI 18
Photos: First image in text from Starfield’s media at https://bethesda.net/en/game/starfield/media?type=image, all other images screenshots of Starfield taken by the author.

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