Note: I originally wrote this in 2023 and never published it in the hope that Starfield would either get better or I’d regain the interest to go back and finish it. Neither has happened after two years, so I’m giving up and publishing this one unmodified.
Starfield‘s ad campaign prominently features one of the characters saying that the game’s core faction is dedicated to answering one question: “what’s out there?” Well, having played for just over 130 hours and having spent nearly all of that time exploring planets in a determined quest to find the answer, I can confidently say that the answer is… basically nothing. Oh, sure, there are nearly 1700 planets and roughly the same number of plants and animals to find, but hardly any of them have as much meaningful content as a single typical cave in Skyrim, and even fewer are as memorable as whichever cave you just thought of. The game’s most impressive achievement is that it layers so many initially promising systems on top of this barren wasteland that it can keep pulling you along with the rarely fulfilled promise of something interesting. Sure, you’ve just explored your 200th featureless Helium/Iron or Helium/Aluminum moon, but surely that Special Projects perk you’re about to unlock will do something interesting! Or maybe that point of interest on the next planet’s third moon won’t be yet another pointlessly highlighted copy of the same signal station you’ve already cleared six times?
Starfield gets so much mileage out of these promises because, ironically, it completely fails to deliver on them at the beginning. You’re treated to one of the most boring openings in any RPG ever and quickly treated to planetary exploration that reeks of early No Man’s Sky. I nearly refunded at this point, but pressed on thanks to early reviews that promised it would get better. And it did! For the next 20-30 hours, I was finding new and reasonably interesting things at a decent clip. Quite a few of the early star systems you can reach have unique derelict ships or space stations to explore and a few have unique quest lines. This is also early enough that many of the endlessly recycled planet features, alien creatures, and prefab dungeons will still be fresh, so for a while each star system does manage to have entertainment value matching at least a Skyrim cave and sometimes as much as a medium settlement or ruin. That might not sound like a lot for an entire star system, and it isn’t, but it still would have been a respectable amount for a game repeated over each of the dozens of systems. Alas, somewhere after level 30, the content just stops.
It’s hard for me to say exactly where this happened because it took a good while for me to realize what was going on. The star map progresses in level roughly from right to left, and the last system I found with any interesting unique content was somewhere around the middle. Some, maybe even many, of these later systems do have quests from elsewhere associated with them, but if you’re playing the way Starfield seems to intend and just exploring for exploring’s sake, you’ll find basically nothing in them. It’s just an ocean of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of planets whose only points of interest are the same dozen prefab dungeons, whose only creatures are variants on the same dozen models you’ve seen a hundred times, and whose resources you no longer need. You’ll still find some pretty sunsets on them, but that is basically it for systems that easily represent half of the planets in the game. No more derelict space craft, no more unique quests. Just endless copies of the same pointless places over and over again.
And lest you think that I just have incredibly high standards for what counts as interesting exploration, I’ve fully explored each of Mass Effect‘s planets in all of my 5 playthroughs of that game. I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t consider a crashed satellite and a prefab dungeon with a bit of unique story to be worth driving the Mako around a desert for 20 minutes, but it’s good enough for me. The average Starfield planet, though, rarely even has a fraction of the content on the most barren moon the Mako ever touched. And remember, this is only in the second half of the systems. Early on, you absolutely will find enough content to make exploration worthwhile if you’re like me. I don’t know why it drops off as hard as it eventually does. I can only assume they chose to prioritize players who follow questlines over the few like me who want to just explore, but clearly no one told the marketing team if that’s what happened.
Alright, you might be saying, Starfield fails as an exploration game. But earlier I said that it’s at least minimally buggy and has great combat, so does it work in any other respect?
Kind of. I don’t think any of the other systems faceplant as hard exploration, but that’s a high bar. Combat is fun, but since there’s nothing to fight except minimally differentiated human enemies and a few robots. There’s no reason to fight most of the animals and rarely anything to distinguish a level 80 enemy from a level 5 enemy other than bigger numbers. The player at least has some options for progression thanks to the weapon and armor crafting systems, but it’s really just light modular customization and doesn’t go as deep as Skyrim‘s enchantments. Space combat, similarly, seems at first like it might finally be reviving the glory days of X-Wing, but then proceeds to go absolutely nowhere. Your first and last space battle will be distinguishable only by the numbers involved, not by unlocking any kind of revolutionary new weapons or gaining wingmen.
The only other major systems are base building and food/medicine crafting, which both seem pointless. Base building only exists to gather resources automatically, but you never need resources in anything like the volumes you’ll get them unless you’re farming boring delivery quests or trying to craft enough food/medicine to have certain buffs up constantly. The buffs most aren’t that interesting or powerful, though, and the overall difficult of Starfield is quite low, so I don’t know why you’d bother. I suppose building a base on an otherwise empty planet does at least give it something unique, though.
So the exploration is the worst it’s ever been in a Bethesda game and most of the other systems have barely moved since Fallout 4 and Skyrim. I’d love to tell you now that it’s all made up for by wonderful sidequests and a great main story, and for all I know maybe it is. I played this game the same way I played all of Bethesda’s titles and set out to fully explore the world before diving into the main quest or settlements, but I completely lost interest before ever reaching that point. Most other reviews say that these are at least better than the exploration and sometimes even pretty good, but I wouldn’t know.
Bethesda claims to want to support this game for a long time, so if we take them at their word, it’s possible that many of these problems will be fixed after the expansion and the full release of mod tools. I’m sure that modders will be able to fix at least some of these problems as long as the game isn’t abandoned, but the early support from Bethesda doesn’t give me a ton of hope. The game has been out for nearly two months at the time of writing, yet it has only received two patches that provided some minor fixes and a couple of features that modders had already figured out much earlier. Several widely-reported bugs I experienced, like creatures and enemies that don’t spawn, remain unaddressed. It isn’t the most auspicious start to the game’s updates, but maybe the team is just hard at work on a larger fix. Who knows.
Conclusion
As it stands, it’s impossible for me to call Starfield anything other than a failed experiment. It somehow convinced me to play it for much longer than it took me to finish everything in The Witcher 3, twice as long as I’ve so far played Baldur’s Gate 3, and even much longer than I ever spent on one save file in Skyrim or Oblivion, yet I’ve come away with fewer interesting stories than any of those games provided in single chapters or cities. Even had I stopped at 40 or 50 hours before I reached the content cliff, the game I saw in that time is still hard to recommend in a year as strong as this one. Starfield sets out to be everything for everyone, and in failing to commit to any particular vision it only succeeds in showing that it may well be possible to displease all of the people all of the time. I don’t take any pleasure in saying that, but I’d be lying if I ended on anything more positive.
Rating: 50%
Time to beat: I lost interest.
Price: $70