The genre of Open-World Space-Simulation Action RPG both excites and makes me apprehensive about what development teams can achieve. With technology finally allowing us to experience these worlds, it is genuinely exciting to cast our gaze into a world far off into the future, a world that ultimately you and I will not be around to see. Games set around an interstellar humanity are not new – but have typically been linear or segmented experiences that factor in the limited system resources to still deliver a world that seems grand – even if you cannot depart too far from the path laid out in front of you. However, once you factor in open-world gameplay that is rewarding and engaging for players, the complexity increases a thousand-fold. Thinking back to No Man’s Sky which had a tumultuous launch, or Star Citizen which has spent the last decade in alpha testing with only a single star system to show for the team’s effort – delivering on all players’ dreams is a laborious and perhaps impractical effort. But what happens if a studio tries to offer a bit of everything, without throwing everything and the kitchen sink at players at once?
Taking a break from their major IPs of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, Bethesda Softworks is the latest major development team to have a crack at the genre with Starfield, which has just released on the PC and Xbox Series X|S. Acclaimed for their narrative-driven open-world experiences with open support for the modding community, I think the development team were smart with how they approached this game – deliver a world that feels active, open and of a grand scale, but taper some expectations around features that players think they would like, but would spread rewarding content too thin. It is a jack-of-all-trades experience, allowing you to experience Bethesda’s exemplary approach to world-building and world design without breaking the bank on needing to buy a new PC and serving as a foundation for what will be the genre going forward.
You start the game as a custom silent protagonist. Their origins, experiences, traits, appearances and pronouns (he/him, she/her, they/them – a welcome inclusion) are determined by you, the player. Regardless of your history, you start the game as a new peon at a mining rig. Similar to Skyrim however, a twist of fate very early on sees you discover and have an experience with a mysterious ‘artefact’, subsequently gaining the attention of and ultimately joining the Constellation – a well-funded band of space explorers collecting other pieces of this artefact to unlock its secrets. This is the foundation of the game’s story and is ultimately a good 20-30 hour long main questline alone, that will allow you to experience a smattering of gameplay offerings made available by Starfield.
However, this doesn’t mean you are confined to just following the game’s main story route… with a ship at your command, you can opt to disregard to story at any time and forge your personal route ahead – becoming heralded as a force for good across the stars…. or become a dastardly pirate. With approximately 1,000 planets to visit, granted some of which are randomly generated content, there are many hand-built landmark locations to visit with custom settings and interesting questlines to explore – from the resort planet with a mysterious ancient spacecraft above it that doesn’t respond to comms requests, to a bit of corporate espionage on a planetside city doused with neon lights. There are a lot of fun and interesting, choice-driven plots to follow, arguably even more fun than the main scenario, and while quality and mileage does vary, it is nice knowing that if you fly to another system, a new tale is likely awaiting you. For better or worse, when you apply the phrase ‘Time Flies When You Are Having Fun’ to the experience offered by the story alone, I will be honest in saying that what felt like a fun and engaging 30-minute game session wound up being an hour-and-a-half…
A common challenge in any open-world game is ensuring diversity among different locales. Given how planetside locations are procedurally generated based on a tile system, there is only so much that landing on a random section of a random planet will do in the environment department – frankly if it weren’t for the HUD elements I would have easily found myself lost among the barren landscapes. However, when Bethesda Softworks handcrafted locales, such as the different cities, it was a different story. One issue with Fallout and The Elder Scrolls is that every main city locale was more or less limited to the same design language. In Starfield, players can look forward to cities ranging from Future-Western, Postmodern, Neon-Industrial, Mining-Rig and more – all being substantially larger in scale as well. Character designs on the other hand are okay, with many nicely designed and unique characters, but aside from the spacesuits and apparel designs, feels like their models were taken straight out of other Bethesda games. Not a bad thing, but so much more variety would have been welcome. Furthermore, while the game looks great on my playtest device (Xbox Series X) with no frame rate dropping, more options to fine-tune visual quality as is standard with other AAA games nowadays would have been more than welcome.
If I were to describe Starfield’s gameplay in one sentence, it would be “Skyrim but in Space” or “Fallout 4 but in Space”. Ultimately many of the key characteristics and fundamentals of the gameplay experiences come from their tried and proven concepts. You attack enemies with a range of melee and ranged weapons, you risk going to prison if you commit crimes, you incrementally unlock levels to obtain skill points for different facets of gameplay, and you have to deal with that almighty antagonist – your carry-weight limit – every time you visit somewhere new. The core foundations are solid and have continued to work for Bethesda since the early days of their 3D open-world games, but I wouldn’t have said no to them going above and beyond for their brand new IP with a fresh take on the user interface, combat and more. But for what they have, it adapts well and receives a few added touches to jazz up the experience, such as the digital lockpicking system which is much harder than past games, but arguably more satisfying to complete.
As an RPG, the role-playing elements of Starfield are crucial, and they do a good job of setting up expectations from the start. As mentioned above, you are given a good amount of control when starting each character, from the purely physical such as body type and hair, to a background that determines your starter skills and unlocks exclusive dialogue options, and optional traits as a sort of risk and reward system. The skills are a solid mix of every feature you will have access to in-game, initially providing access to certain ships, systems, services etc. and then building upon them with added buffs. My main qualm is that some very valuable skills, such as adding the capacity for more than the base number of crew on your craft, are part of the late-game skill tree. But, what I do appreciate is that you can upgrade each of the skills, and doing so requires you to conduct missions that demonstrate you using them.
One of the weaker elements of Starfield is its approach to piloting ones spacecraft and ship-to-ship combat. Instead of the Star Citizen approach where everything around flying your ship is done in-game, with copious wait times as your craft physically goes from Point A to Point B, Starfield allows you to skip the waiting time and after a short load screen, go from Point C to Point D almost instantly. The issue is that doing this is so unengaging, and travelling is more about navigating menus than anything spacey. Space combat is also relatively straightforward, providing options for players to completely obliterate foes in front of them or take out their engines using the ship’s ‘Targeting Control System’ (if you have skilled up in it) and attempt to take the ship as your own.
Especially with Starfield starting you off with a pretty lacklustre ship, this is something that you will eventually want to do – as it works out substantially better than paying hundreds of thousands of in-game credits for a ship. Once you have a ship, you can freely customise it using a range of parts from five different in-universe manufacturers, mixing and matching to get different combinations of combat/storage/speed efficiency, whilst also tailoring the ship interior to your liking. The advantage is that you have numerous options to customize your ship, both in terms of performance and aesthetics, even down to individual window designs. On the not-so-positive side, however, is that after a few hours of gameplay, you can theoretically build a ship without too much hassle that would last you for the rest of the game – cramming every hub into the one craft. Having to work towards more exclusive or valuable parts outside of a few skill tree updates would have made a truly defining feature of the game, much more impressive. I have a feeling that ship customisation, and making your ship feel more like a home, will be the subject of either modding or official DLC shortly.
Starfield is both a solid game in its own right, but also a strong foundation towards what the game could be in the future. With the basics of what an accessible Open-World Space-Simulation Action RPG should look like sorted – I am really excited to see where the community takes user-generated content next – from new locales to visit on the world map, to new missions to perhaps some of the raunchier content that has become available for Oblivion, Skyrim and all Bethesda Fallout games in the past. Still very early days, but hopefully the foundations are there to make custom content both accessible and ambitious. On a less positive note, the game is still very buggy, so I would expect to see some post-launch updates launching over the coming weeks and months. Issues such as getting stuck, visual glitches and such were commonplace, while the auto-save also frustratingly didn’t kick in nearly enough (nothing like having your last auto-save generated an hour earlier). Probably the biggest bug however was where (to the best of my knowledge), my character no-clipped out of the ship mid-cutscene, followed by a loud continual banging sound which (as this was 2 a.m.), kindly woke everyone in my house up, and what felt like could have been the whole neighbourhood. In true Bethesda fashion, expect bugs to rear their heads, although at least the game felt more stable than past games at launch.
Starfield may not tick all the boxes for anyone hoping this is a true open-world game, but when you see the ambitious and time-consuming projects that are seeking to deliver a scaled and fully open universe to explore, Bethesda Softworks has struck a good balance and delivered an experience that puts fun and interesting content at the forefront. This is a bingeworthy game, and easily one of the highlights of the Xbox Game Pass at this time, especially thanks to the amount of activities there are to do and the narrative gems to unlock. Here’s hoping that the development team continues to build upon the Starfield IP, both in this initial release and in future offerings, as it has a lot of potential. And now community, do your thing and use the game as a canvas for your next creative modding and custom content ventures!
This review was conducted on an Xbox Series X version of the game. A review code was provided by Bethesda ANZ for the purpose of this review.
