Game reviewed on PC with Ultra Settings, minor spoiler warning with further spoiler warnings below.
Most video games played in my 30s are games that come with the notion of a relationship. These aren’t wham, bam, thank you ma’am games, a white hot blitz of passion for 8 hours never to see each other again. No, if I’m making a commitment to a video game it’s the real deal, and I expect it to be a fruitful marriage for weeks if not months of my life. With that, my gaming has become more and more limited to a release or two per year at most. Expectations are high, and I learn more things about a game than I probably should. Enter then, Bethesda’s latest release: Starfield.
Billed as the first game of its sort that’s stem to stern developed by Bethesda, as opposed to a game or universe purchased from another company, Starfield is a deep space explorer/combat narrative that tries to balance RPG with modern combat mechanics. As a refreshing surprise right from the start, there’s more RPG in this game than this company usually provides. This is done well from the aspect of character creation complete with traits and starter perks, but also done poorly with a molasses slow start to the open world experience.
I’m not smart enough to know why Bethesda chooses to start open world games with an hour plus commitment of an introduction quest, but Starfield is no exception to that thinking. It won’t kill all future playthroughs (more to come on that), but it still sucks to follow a breadcrumb trail to get to the fun parts. Anyway, you start as a miner deep inside a moon toiling for your pay masters before you discover a crazy little fragment in the rock called an Artifact. Since you’re the most-specialest boy in the world as a player character, touching the Artifact sends you on a monolith style trip out across the galaxy and back in a way that would make Stanley Kubrick proud. You soon join up with a righteously funded group of explorers called Constellation, and begin the long journey of tracking down the rest of these Artifacts and to learn just what the hell all this might mean.
Before you get to the meat of the story, the main quest fails to convey a sense of urgency, and I mean that in the best possible way. To ignore the main quest in Starfield is not only agreeable, but makes you less of a psychopath character-wise compared to other games like Fallout 4. You’re not fucking off to distant moons and planets while your spouse and child have been kidnapped or murdered, you’re simply choosing not to pal around with some rich nerds for a while they fret about their nerd collection and explore the galaxy your own way.
The game world once you’re finally able to get lost in it has a lot to explore, and a lot of things to do. You can explore hundreds of different planets and moons, but the exploration occurs only on the surfaces of those orbitals themselves, and not so much out in the vacuum of space. For some, this goes against the idea of being a space exploration game, and I don’t disagree. I’d love to be a space trucker that’s piloting across the big black, but that’s not what’s on offer here. However, if planet hopping and searching for minerals, plants and animals is your bag, there’s hours and hours of fun to be had. I was more surprised how much combat there was when exploring as well. Think of it as radiant quests built upon even more radiant quests, and that’s before you even get to the dozen or so ACTUAL radiant quests the game offers on top. It’s not the same mechanic, but as a fellow space game there’s a “No Man’s Sky” quality to the length of play, should you choose to address the game as such.
Mechanically, the game was graphically smooth for me in both combat and game world interaction, but some issues in my first playthrough couldn’t be overlooked. A game of this size will never ever be bug free, but even with that grace zone of minor hiccups, I still had headaches that pissed me off. Little hassles like my king-sized late-game ship not landing right on some spaceports. More aggravating issues like a non-critical companion that vanished from the game world. But the worst for me was a side quest that couldn’t be completed because everyone turned hostile. It would be too spoiler-y to explain fully, but when I had Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a lady computer scientist from the 1800s, and Amelia Earhart shooting at me unprovoked, it was an unforgivable sin to what should be a fond gaming memory.
The main story, once you choose to interact with it, settles in and gives you some true science fiction that’s more than the space battles and people-conflict that the rest of the game world is based around. In essence you’re collecting Artifacts, gaining powers (think Skyrim type stuff), and meeting more core level companions. For the first dozen hours or so, this was kinda ho-hum for me. I was getting well compensated with credits and powers and finding new places to explore, but the actual story wasn’t coming to light. Most of my time was spent with the game’s core companion group on side content. Sarah Morgan, the leader of Constellation, is force fed to you in the early gameplay, so you’re encouraged to do a lot of exploring with her. Save for a few specific quests, you can play the game solo, but Starfield wants and perhaps NEEDS you to play with Sarah, and tries to make it as alluring as possible. She’s smart, has a lot of say in dialogue, she’s pretty, has a British accent, is apparently bi or pansexual…you see where I’m going here. It’s not Bethesda just trying to make you fan yourself on the fainting couch either, they really want you to develop some feelings for this companion specifically, which leads to the game’s hook at the mid-game mark.
****SUPER Spoilers from here on out, you’ve been warned****
After collecting enough breadcrumbs and macguffins, a new type of NPC shows up called the Starborn. Basically, they hate what you’re doing with the Artifacts and want to stop you, up to and including space and ground combat with you over it. They can cloak themselves, they disappear when they die, it’s all very different from the rest of the game, and serves as a marker to the main story’s progression. Naturally, you’re facing off against a boss-type of this Starborn mid-game when suddenly you’re presented with a choice of defending one of two critical locations to Constellation. By the end of it, with the way the game is mapped out and slots the variables, whichever of the four base companions you have the highest affinity with (which the game tries really hard to be Sarah) will likely be dead. It made me feel an emotion, but not in the way the game would have wanted. I wasn’t just bummed about losing my literal in-game wife that I literally in-game married, but I felt fucked with by the game itself. Every damn named character in this game outside of pre-approved combat seems to be tagged as essential, making them immortal for 99% of the game’s narrative. When considering a choice of who to help in this quest, I didn’t worry about any one of those 4 companions specifically. Not because I trusted my game-wife’s ability to defend herself, but because the girl wouldn’t die even if I wanted her to outside of this quest. You go through a funeral and a whole mourning period before pushing forward, but while it’s meant to boost you on into completing the main quest with more urgency, it left a sour taste in my mouth for several more hours than intended.
Obviously, the companion death was plot dependent, and serves as a big part of the game’s final stretch. I’ll save SOME of the spoilers, but the long and short of the final confrontation involves the concept of multiple universes and being the swiss army knife that can walk their way through it. On its face, the idea of the metaverse to me is just a way for Marvel to make more movies with less ideas, but in the concept of THIS video game in THIS way, I see it as an interesting way to construct a game.
Once you put all the Artifacts together, at the end of the day you have the opportunity to walk through and complete the game. In most grand scale RPGs playing a new game means starting the whole thing over and you, yourself as the person holding the controller have the opportunity to make better or different decisions in quests to maximize your own gameplay. With Starfield the idea of a new game is what ties the whole idea together and brings the thing into full circle. The concept of a “New Game Plus” or NG+ certainly wasn’t invented by Starfield, but it’s interesting in the way it was executed. When walking through the magic door at the end of one playthrough to begin another, you not only get to skip the first slow part of the main quest, but you get to keep your perks and character level. While your weapons and items are wiped away, you’re the same developed character who now shares YOUR knowledge from the previous playthrough. At many points in the new playthrough you get special dialogue options that prove you’ve done this before, and it adds a whole new wrinkle to the idea of multiple playthroughs. It’s almost like Bethesda finally admits they couldn’t blow your mind with a compelling story, so they broke it down so far that the act of playing this game is the game itself. Metaverse, indeed.
Verdict: Starfield is a fun to play massive undertaking of a game that if nothing else will give back your money’s worth in quest content and repeatable exploration fun. The bugs, while not as prevalent in other games from this developer, can still cause a headache and need to be addressed sooner rather than later. Space combat, a brand new element to the Bethesda gaming world, was surprisingly fun and added more to do in the radiant quest world with dog fights, space pirating, or deep space justice with an iron fist among the laundry list of options. A story that stays thin on purpose allowing the player to explore the intricacies of the world while force feeding you painful moments in order to push it along was a bit aggravating, but rewards the player for completion AND playing it a 2nd time. While not groundbreaking, Starfield’s use of New Game Plus is smooth as silk and should be commended for directly confronting this feature not only as the player but as the character as well. It’s not a brave new world for gaming in general, but for Bethesda and the mega corporations that are swallowing this gaming marketplace, it’s a brief shimmer of light among the infinite depths of the blackest sea.
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