Starfield: First Thoughts

Starfield, the first AAA game I’ve personally played from launch since 2019 sort of snuck up on me. With games taking a decade to publish, if we’re lucky, I’ve started to lose faith in the notion that there’s a great new game to play every year. The cold reality is that I’m too old and out of demo for a lot of the hot games coming out, and I can go several years without feeling that NEED to dig into the games entering the national conversation.

That said, Starfield snuck up on me as I had assumed it was one of the many anticipated games that would never come out of the “soon” timetable, and was only hyped about a week and a half out. After spending the extra money like a sucker and getting the early access on Steam, I’ve grinded some early hours out in deep space and I’m down to share some of my initial thoughts. Let’s take to the final frontier and see how Bethesda shakes things up with a new idea. I’ll perhaps write a more formal review down the road, but as I’m sipping this game, making sweet slow love to this game, I’ll just share a mass of my thoughts as it sits after my first several hours.

My version was on PC via steam on a decent gaming rig, and there were no issues so far with stuttering or graphics issues, and the game is quite pretty to look at
The character creator is as robust as we’ve come to expect, but despite being in deep space you can only play as a human

The game is gender non specific as you can assign different pronouns to either body style and even “walk style” (I assume the pronouns adjust dialogue from NPCs)
Each character has a “background” and the option to take up to 3 traits
- The background will give you three perk baselines based on your character’s “history”
- Traits are like the classic games where there’s a positive and a negative, and there are a good variety to consider
Perks are selected at level ups, but also increase their own sublevels by doing things related to the perk (ex: Shotgun perk increases when you kill 30 enemies with a shotgun)
Conversations give the appearance of being meaningful, but the game likely won’t have any game defining moments based on conversation. It’ll get you out of a fight, but not change the game narrative

Your player character is not voiced, and dialogue is more like the classic games with selections of text that give more variance
This is the most roleplay friendly Bethesda game perhaps ever, but the hardcore RPG fans will still find faults in the RPG elements as produced

“I’m tired of fumbling with round fruit.”

Combat is good for gunplay. Guns are satisfying and there’s a good excitement fighting the pirates early on
There’s a lot of lore, but it’s not needed to have fun. I was worried about the universe not interesting me but I still find myself looking through notebooks and computers in the locations hunting for flavor text
Had The Outer Worlds not existed, I think Starfield’s finished product would have come out different. There’s a seasoning of the “western sci-fi” that will have nerdy Firefly fans cumming in their pants
Most of the sci-fi references probably sail right over my head, but there’s plenty of them
The map/compass is improved from past games, and your eyes can focus more on the world in front of you than some compass marker at the bottom of the screen
Flying a spaceship isn’t labor intensive, as it’s mostly energy management and combat technique, but adds an extra layer to the game
Travel between planets is NOT a huge thing, and if you’re hoping for the vastness of No Man’s Sky, just get that out of your head
- Space battles may pop up as you enter a planet’s general area, and you may become part of other battles in progress
Lockpicking is a new minigame, and at least so far is an interesting new way of doing it. You have to line up different little bits from your “Digipick” to fall into place based on a few options, and you have to “plan” the way you attempt to pick the lock.

The currency is “credits” and is fairly straightforward from previous games. Credits are found on bodies and can be found on little zip drive type things laying around the world
Commerce is about as you’d expect, you can interact with kiosks and shops, and buy and sell seamlessly.
There is no weapon degradation, so selling collected weapons from corpses is going to be a credit making scheme early on

A trait I took was “Dream Home” which gives me a house on some Moon somewhere, but comes with a mortgage I’ll have to pay weekly
- There’s plenty of roleplay opportunities to act as a merc with main and side quest content to keep the money flowing
Planet exploration is neat at least at first, and you can “scan” and mine all sorts of living and non-living things, mixing up non-combat activities
Your space suit is a separate part of your inventory and can be upgraded, and needs to be considered depending on a planet’s characteristics
To keep it simple: if you liked Fallout 4/Skyrim, you’ll enjoy Starfield. No need to debate, just buy it and you’ll have a good time