Starfield (2023)
Fast-Travelling across the universe
Space exploration in media has always been so fascinating to me. It’s often difficult to strike a balance between doing too much or too little when the entirety of the universe is at your disposal. Do you lean on the exploration aspect of it, or do you center your story on a settled world beyond earth? Do you take the alien approach where other life-forms somehow speak perfect English, or do you focus on a human-driven story?
Known for critically acclaimed games like Skyrim and Fallout, Bethesda decided to dip their toes into this genre and create answers to all these questions in their first new IP in over 20 years, Starfield; a game that tells the story of diving into the unknown in a world where every planet in the universe is at your fingertips.
This is my first time playing through a Bethesda game from start to finish. While other might just describe this as “Skyrim in Space” to me this is a brand new experience. I was cautious jumping into this; these games are known for being enormous, sometimes overwhelmingly so, with an unfathomable number of side-quests, modes and mechanics that can make your RPG experience truly unique.
Since I was taking advantage of my Game Pass subscription, I only wanted to dip my toes a bit and try it out for a couple of weeks. 5 months and over 50 hours of gameplay later, I clearly did not hold my promise and I have so much to say about it.
The World of Starfield
Starfield is set in the year 2330. Earth was deemed inhabitable and technology advancements have made space exploration possible. Buying a spaceship and flying to Mars is the equivalent of buying a fancy car and taking a small road trip to the beach. As a result, the concept of “space exploration” is lost; traveling pretty much anywhere is possible, so research into the stars and the unknown is no longer necessary.
This world feels real and believable. Instead of going for a full fantasy futuristic vibe like Star Trek, Bethesda opted for an aesthetic they refer as NASA Punk that avoids sleek touch screens for buttons and levers. I am absolutely in love with this stylistic choice. Spaceships often look rustic, they are built for function, not aesthetic, and still use gasoline instead of a magical energy source.
While the NASA Punk aesthetic is predominantly used, different planets have different aesthetics, from the western cowboy inspired Akila City, to the bright lights of Neon City, there’s something here for everyone.
It's clear that Bethesda did their homework here, the attention to detail is insane. Each solar system has a list of habitable planets, each with its own set of characteristics, such as gravity and, based on its distance from the nearest star, a specific day/night cycle. Speaking of time, the game is always running on two clocks, one for the planet you're currently on and a Universal Time, mirroring Earth's time. And this is just scratching the surface of all the different attributes they take into account on each planet visited during your adventure.
Sadly for Tim Curry, space has been corrupted by capitalism. The “United Colonies” are settled in a large number of planets, with a military of their own and everything... Yeah, pretty on the nose. Since spaceships use gasoline, it’s almost a guarantee to see Fracking stations on every habitable planet. If it weren’t for copyright issues, I could perfectly imagine seeing Coca-Cola and Starbucks logos across the galaxy. Even when the game presents a “perfect society”, such as the beautiful city of New Atlantis, you can always tell it’s a facade and that poverty, despair and crime are very much part of this world.
When starting the game, you can tell a story has been happening for some time. The known solar systems to mankind, aptly named the “Settled Systems”, are just recovering from a big war. There are several factions, including space pirates, space libertarians, and several space cults.
To avoid drowning you in exposition, the game has a very clever way of teaching you the lore and story of Starfield. On most dialogue choices, you have the option to ask questions based on the context. For example, when being briefed on a mission regarding the Crimson Fleet, a group of space pirates, often a choice will simply be the question “What is the crimson fleet?”. This does not advance the conversation, but it gives you an in-game answer directly from the character you’re talking with. Of course, these are optional; the more you advance in the game and learn about the lore, the less you will need them.
Needless to say, I adore this world. I want to see spin-offs and comics and movies and cartoon shorts and so much more set in this universe. Bethesda created something special here when it comes to world building. The focus is centered so much on the human aspect that they avoided creating any sort of intelligent alien life as part of their world. I loved learning every single detail about this universe, and getting immersed in its fantastic lore.
Your Character
Meet Nav, a morally grey scoundrel that only cares about scheming her way into making a quick buck. Her silver tongue can persuade even the most fearsome leader. She hides her rough beginnings in Neon City with jokes and wit, but has a soft spot for the working people struggling to make a living.
This is obviously more information than what the game asks you to provide, but when the game gives you so many options, coming in with a backstory helps you drive your character forward (doing a self-insert is simply too boring). I wasn't making choices with my moral compass, but Nav’s, and that makes the game much more interesting.
One of my biggest pet peeves is first-person games with cool character creators. What's the point of spending literal hours (whoops) building a character only to not be shown. While Starfield does offer and did market a 3rd person mode, it is simply awful. I really, really tried but the game is simply not built for it.
When it comes to skill customization, Starfield really makes you go wild with how to build your character the way you want to play. You can be a full research nerd, an engineer focused on ships, a soldier, and much, much more. The options are so varied in a way to make your character feel truly unique.
I built Nav mostly on social skills. Persuasion is very useful to avoid fights, and bribery makes sure you always get what you want… for a price. I made her an expert at handling small firearms as I felt she wouldn’t vibe with a big gun… which led to problems I will get to later.
Persuasion checks are fun because they focus on actual conversations instead of a die roll. You have to listen to what the other person is saying and answer accordingly. Bend too much or suddenly raise the stakes and you will fail. You could replay the same persuasion conversation several times, and the “right answer” might change each time.
Starfield has a very interesting way of leveling up skills. Each skill point, obtained from leveling up, can be spent to unlock a skill. Let’s take the Pistol Certification, for example: you can unlock it with a skill point and it automatically grants you 10% damage increase with pistols. However, to increase the skill level, you need to kill 10 enemies with a pistol, and only then you can level up the skill to allow 15% damage increase. It’s so clever to get better at a skill by simply using it, and having a clear goal to make your character better at it.
With over 40 available skills with 4 levels each, it’s impossible to be a master at everything. Choosing carefully which skills to unlock based on the character you’re trying to build is so much fun. There are skills I didn’t even get close to touching, such as cooking, researching, piloting and so much more; this design helps each character feel unique. The way I built Nav, I went for mostly social skills, but also things like scavenging and lock-picking, since it felt natural.
My one gripe with Starfield is that it is a first-person shooter first and foremost. No matter the character you build, you have to make them a one-person army capable of killing everyone in their path. There are dozens of situations where talking can avoid a gunfight, but a shootout is a given in most situations you find yourself in, and there's nothing you can do about it. This breaks the idea of building your own character, because it always circles back to knowing how to shoot a gun. I felt at a disadvantage by not focusing my skill points simply on getting better at gunplay. My tiny pistols were not enough to handle an army of enemies, and by the end I had to rely on bigger weapons to get the job done.
I know it’s a video game and there must be some sort of gameplay beyond just exploring, but for so much Starfield does to really make your character unique, and it does an excellent job at it, at the end of the day they will always have to know how to kill.
Your Ship
So much of the story revolves around space exploration, so of course the team at Bethesda had to make their spaceships be something truly special… right?
Your spaceship feels like an extension of your character. While you can purchase multiple ships, The Frontier will likely be your home for most of your adventure. I grew attached to this old hunk of metal that really didn’t have anything special, but it was my home for most of the game.
Bethesda being Bethesda, of course ship customization is incredible. Every single part of your ship is comprised of the necessary elements it needs to fly, which adds into the believability of this world. If you decide to change the look and feel of your ship on the outside, it will also change it on the inside.
Customization is deep here. You can change your engines, your reactor (which powers the ship), shields, weapons, gas tanks, docking station, grav drive (which we’ll get to in a second), cockpit and so much more. As long as you follow the rules the game sets for you, your imagination is the limit. These rules are set for the sense of realism, like creating a ship without landing gear or with multiple engines without the proper reactor, which I do appreciate.
I didn’t touch most of the ship customization options until it was required for me to do so, but when I finally did, I lost hours of my day just playing around with the Lego-like interface that this mode provides. Despite it just being clipping parts together, the design you chose for your ship can be truly unique.
But everything falls apart when you actually launch into space. Flying your ship is so unnecessary as soon as you realize the limitations of Starfield. You can’t seamlessly launch from a planet. You can’t seamlessly land on a planet. You can’t even travel between planets within a solar system. Why? because they wanted the authenticity.
“umm… actually, it takes more than 3 days to go from Earth to the Moon, it wouldn’t be realistic for the player to spend days flying a spaceship 🤓” said some nerd at Bethesda at some point. You can only fly in orbit of a planet or moon, and in a very reduced space. So you might be asking “then how do I go from planet to planet?”, the answer is menus. It’s all menus. All exploration in the game is up to the player to move through some menus hoping they pick a planet with something to do.
To justify the realism of actually moving across the universe, the game explains that humanity created a device to bend gravity and basically teleport anywhere called Gravitational Drives, or Grav Drives. It works in a similar fashion to what Star Wars does with Hyperspace, but it's also used to jump from planet to planet. Because of course, the distance between planets is ridiculously large in real life and they wanted this to feel authentic.
That feeling of climbing a mountain and seeing something in the distance, Gone. This is Starfield’s biggest sin. If you remove dogfights from the equation, and you should because they are rarely mandatory, your ship is basically useless from a gameplay standpoint. The openness of exploring the universe is lost, because Bethesda wanted the game to feel real and authentic.
At a certain point in the game, not even walking is required. After traveling to known locations, fast-travel becomes available and walking becomes optional; you can simply select a desired destination in the map and you will be zipped there in an instant. Useful, sure, but this only reinforces the constant menu navigation required to play this game.
I will say that I got quickly used to this. Once the realization hits you, the only thing you can do is accept it. It was a design choice and no patch will ever fix this. The building of the spaceship and the idea of traveling across the stars is still fun once you accept the game for what it is, but it’s still very disappointing that most of your time exploring is done in the pause menu.
Your story
The narrative of Starfield is divided in two parts: There’s The Story (AKA the main plot of the game) and then there’s Your Story.
Let’s start with The Story: Regardless of background, your character starts as a miner in some random planet. You are instructed to retrieve a mysterious “artifact” that, upon touching it, makes you see visions and knocks you out. Through these means, you meet a team of explorers, called Constellation. A secret organization that plays the part of NASA in this story: exploring the universe and the unknown.
These artifacts are a series of unknown objects scattered across the universe. They seem to react with one another, but they are built with materials not known to man. Out of curiosity for the unknown, Constellation sets out to collect all artifacts, and this is the main plot that drives you from planet to planet throughout the 30+ hour main story.
As for main plot, this is kind of it. It’s just something to drive the narrative forward, but how you collect these artifacts is the interesting part. Some of them will be hidden in a mine, others will have to be bought from a merchant who found it first. Each artifact is collected within a separate contained story. Some of them miss, but most of them are exciting and take you through some interesting parts of the universe. I won’t go into any detail because these are best experienced fresh.
The first-person shooter aspect is also a problem here, though. Constellation likes to be an organization about exploring the unknown… but they sure do love using their guns. It breaks the immersion a little bit for me. Sometimes their way to obtain a mysterious artifact is to kill a bunch of people. Bad people, sure, but that’s still blood on their hands.
Now let’s talk about Your Story: in other words, what happens between Constellation missions. This is where you can have your own adventure, your own way, with your own moral compass. You could technically play this game for hundreds of hours without doing a single story mission besides the introduction. You can join the military, become a space pirate or join a cult. It really is up to you.
This is where the game shines in my opinion. There are soooo many small contained stories within this universe. Many can be summarized as fetch quests, but some just hit different. This is where most of the roleplaying aspect comes through; you can make choices that deeply alter the narrative and outcome. You can choose to literally kill everyone on board a military ship if you wanted. Or you could persuade your way into a big cash reward for doing a good deed (which is what my character, Nav, would often do).
One story involves the president of a resort asking you to investigate a looming spaceship that’s been in orbit for months, failing to communicate. When you go investigate, you realize it’s a ship filled with humans with very old technology. Apparently, these humans left earth before Grav Drive technology was a thing, so they spent 200 years lost in space. You can help them obtain a Grav Drive and haggle a discount in the process… or you could just say fuck it and kill them all. A bit morbid but it is an option.
Another story gets triggered when you smuggle something into a United Colonies planet where, instead of simply paying a fine or doing jail time, you can agree to infiltrate a group of space pirates called “The Crimson Fleet”, and destroy them from the inside.
The game is filled to the brim with these contained stories. Even the ones that are not that good serve some sort of purpose, either for world-building or simply to practice your roleplay a bit by making choices based on the character you build. It is my understanding this is where Bethesda games shine, and I can see that clearly reflected in Starfield.
Without giving too much away, I am happy to say the ending is simply fantastic and its integration with New game + is done very cleverly. The story is intriguing and it keeps that mystery going till the very end.
Starfield is an incredible game, plain and simple. Never before have I been able to roleplay a character with this much freedom, and have the dialogue options to support the narrative I want for my character. I segmented my review the way I did because the game simply provides you a setting; what you do inside of it is entirely up to you.
Once you get over the hump of space travel and take the game for what it is, it really becomes this fantastic game that you can make your own. People who are into this game are really into it for a reason; I’ve seen podcasts and huge subreddits of people sharing the love for the game and their own personal stories. It is rare to find games that have this sort of effect on people, and I get it.
It is genuinely sad for me that I will never be able to experience the entirety of this game. After over 50 hours, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what this game offers; I see half of the solar systems available completely unexplored…
But I cannot dedicate my entire life to this game, I’m too jobful1 to spend over 300 hours exploring every last inch of this world. I want to be out there in the stars exploring, finding more side stories, and chart every single planet in the settled systems, but at the end of the day, I must leave some mysteries unsolved and simply cherish the time I had playing Starfield.
Credit to my fiancée for this line
Meli mention!!!!