We've been hearing for years that Starfield is Bethesda's passion project, a game that they've been wanting to make even before Morrowind came out.

If this game is Bethesda's passion project, then they've lost their passion.

Plenty of reviewers are dragging Starfield for its technical issues. While it's true that Bethesda should not get a free pass on that stuff just because "lol, they're Bethesda", I was prepared to accept a certain level of jank if it meant experiencing an inspired world. What really kills this game is that the setting itself is deeply, relentlessly boring. It's a haphazard collage of space frontier tropes. And you know what? That could have been fine. Tropes can be effective when wielded in service of a strong creative vision. But here, there is no greater vision. There is nothing, and I mean *nothing*, to this setting beyond the tropes that serve as its foundation.

For our major powers, we have a vaguely Western-flavored federal government, a vaguely Texan-flavored frontier alliance, a vaguely Eastern-flavored corpocracy, some scrappy pirates, and some mysterious religious zealots. There is nothing meaningful to know about any of these societies beyond whatever pictures of them you just conjured in your head. If you have an ounce of creativity, the pictures in your head are probably more detailed and compelling than the crap that made it into the game. It almost seems like these factions have been consciously sanitized, as if someone went through the first draft and removed any cultural or aesthetic identifiers beyond the baseline of "Hey, this frontier guy wears a cowboy hat, likes guns, and has a bit of a stubborn streak!". You'd think that the writers would be forced to come up with some creative quirks just to explain how these people adapted to their alien environments, but even that minimal level of flavor exceeds the bounds of Bethesda's vision.

This aggressive blandness persists at every scale. We have planets that run the gamut of environmental conditions, but none of them impose meaningful gameplay changes (aside from gravity's effect on jump height, which is basically the lowest hanging fruit possible), inspire variations on the ten or so prefabricated structures that we can encounter, or even have much influence on which of the handful of flora, fauna, and feature assets can populate the game's tragically samey landscapes. One of the foundational aspects of space exploration as a genre is exploring how extreme conditions shape strategies and societies. Starfield cares so little for this relationship that it borders on immersion-breaking. I expected that Starfield would rely on repeatable assets to some extent, and that exploration would lose its shine once you've exhausted the list of things to encounter. What I didn't expect was just how short that list would be, or how sloppily curated it would be in the context of the game's environments.

And then there's the writing. Oh goodness, the writing. The best thing I can say is that, on a micro scale, it consists of grammatically correct sentences which could plausibly be uttered by a sane human being. Beyond that, it's shot through with the same listlessness that permeates every other aspect of the game. I'll present two case studies.

I came upon a sidequest where an unknown vessel was orbiting a resort planet. Investigation reveals it to be a generation ship sent from Old Earth, back before humanity developed FTL travel. They don't take it well when you explain that their new home has already been claimed by Space Epcot. The captain asks you, some random hobo who just happened across them, to negotiate with the corpos on their behalf. They send along no observers or advocates, and don't even think to request a direct line of communication. The corpos offer you three options: blow up the ship and kill the colonists, coerce them into indentured servitude, or pay out of your own pocket to install an FTL drive aboard their ship so they can find another planet. There are no other options to advocate for the colonists. At no point does either party express any sort of cultural interest, or even basic curiosity about the other. There are no potential interactions with other factions or alternate arrangements for compensation, despite it being well-established that everything to do with Old Earth (down to the meanest paperweight) is treated as an invaluable piece of vintage history. The situation has the setup for a potentially game-changing historical event, and the most interesting thing Bethesda can squeeze from it is "Corpos bad, are you willing to pay to feel better than them?" If a 15th century carrack made landfall on the shores of Florida carrying the long lost descendents of Ferdinand Magellan's twin brother, I don't think Disney World's first reaction would be "♥♥♥♥, they want our land, pump 'em full of lead!"

Second case study. There's a plotline where you infiltrate the big pirate faction on behalf of the feds, right under the nose of their cunning leader and his paranoid, security-obsessed XO. So how do you stay in contact with your handlers during this delicate deep cover op? By PHYSICALLY FLYING FROM THE PIRATE BASE TO THE FEDERAL FLAGSHIP every time you complete a mission. Holy hell, are dead drops not a thing in this universe? Are the feds actively trying to give you away? During these OpSec-destroying excursions, you'll have the opportunity to turn in supplementary evidence on the pirates' many crimes. This evidence comes in the form of incriminating tapes that are just laying around in the general vicinity of the perpetrators. None of them, including the canny, wary pirate leaders, will raise objections to you stuffing said tapes into your knapsack in full view of everyone. While turning in these tapes, you'll speak to the federal XO, who repeatedly inquires as to your impressions of the pirate leader. You can either lie and say he's a nosepicking vagrant, in which case you'll be praised for your patriotism, or you can accurately inform her that he's an intelligent and charismatic figure who poses a real threat, in which case she'll chew you out for the betrayal of respecting the enemy. The questline sustains this level of cartoonishness right up to the end, where the defeated, betrayed pirate leader tells your narc ass that he's proud of you because deep down, you're the greatest pirate of all. A generous reading could paint this horrorshow as a satire of Hoover's CIA or something, but I'm not feeling very generous at the moment.

The common thread between these two cases is apathy. These scenarios have the potential to be so interesting and memorable, and the writers probably have the chops to deliver. But instead, they just... settle for mediocrity. They're writing with the expectation that they won't be held to a high standard. Situations don't have to make sense, commentary doesn't need to be thoughtful, narrative potential doesn't yearn to be realized. Dialogue is just there to point the way towards more gameplay, so write a few words and move on to the next contrivance. More and more, I feel like Bethesda views their games as theme parks; they're not writing a story, they're building a bunch of rides and doing the minimum necessary to shuffle people from one to the other.

And now, the rides aren't even fun. Starfield uses humdrum, recycled assets to simulate a humdrum, recycled setting. None of its components do anything to support each other: not the worldbuilding, not the environments, not the gameplay, not the writing. Every part of this game talks past every other part, and if you care to listen, you'll find that they're all just rambling drunkenly about the weather. The result is a joyless, colorless mess memorable only for the lengths it goes to insult its players. Bethesda can do better than this. But they probably won't, because they don't think they have to, and apparently professional shame isn't enough of a motivator for them.

Update: Bethesda is now charging for individual quests through the creation kit. $7 for a quest in a game THAT YOU PAID $70 FOR. And the real cost is actually $10 because you have to purchase their currency to get it. Granted, no one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy this but it sets such a bad precedent. After the initial release being entirely mid it was clear that this game needed a CP2077-esque redemption arc to save it. Instead they started charging for individual quests. Do they just have contempt for their audience?

I wasn't going to write this at first because I was so 50/50 on recommending it or not but after Bethesda started replying to negative reviews about why the reviews they've written are wrong I feel compelled to write something.

I would not recommend this game for $70. I would recommend waiting until the game is fully released with all of its DLCs *on* *sale* to buy it. To me there was just not enough there to justify the price. It feels like a game that's only had a few years of development rather than seven and it's just kind of under cooked.

The game itself is just boring and uninspired. It's sterile and safe, built to appeal to the widest possible audience and not offend anybody. The characters sometimes have their shining moments but for the most part are bland and your companions are the worst of these offenders because they all have the same opinion on everything, they're all the same. The characters also don't look great, they have this dead eyed uncanny valley effect to them made worse by the skyrim style zoom in whenever they talk.

The quests themselves with the exception of a few, are so uninspired and boring and offer no moral dilemmas or require any serious thought. Compare the Ryujin quest line to the thieves guild quest line in Oblivion. With the thieves guild quest like there is a gradual progression which teaches the player not only how to be a thief but what to expect as far as how challenging a given assignment will be. Ryujin gives you three childishly easy quests that are so easy that they neither teach you how to be a thief nor give you an idea of what's to come then the difficulty meter suddenly jumps with the next quest to really quite difficult. Thankfully I happened to have enough levels saved up to dump some points into stealth otherwise I would have had to fail or just leave the quest, level up, and come back. This quest comparison also highlights another issue because Ryujin takes place in one of the saddest areas in the game, Neon.

Locations. What is Bethesdas engine really good at? It makes it relatively easy to hand craft huge worlds. So what does Starfield do? They hand crafted a few locations and left the rest up to procedural generation of course!... Oh, well... the few hand crafted locations are great right? No? Oh okay then. New Atlantis is kinda cool but it's so small, it's close to having some literal and figurative depth to it with the well but that's barely explored. New Akila looks cool but again is far too small. The Key is not a city. And Neon... Oh Jesus Christ Neon...

Neon is "we have Nightcity from CP2077 at home." It's suppose to be this cyberpunk, blade runner-esque city rampant with crime and drug use. You basically get the DisneyLand (not even DisneyWorld) version of that. There is no crime to witness. There are no daily schedules like Oblivion npcs had. Just the same blank faces staring at you like your ♥♥♥♥ is out but you don't know it like all the other cities. They hype up a drug that can only be bought in a particular very talked up club in Neon and the club is one of the saddest things i've ever seen in a game. It's one relatively tiny room with flashing neon lights and out of shape spandex wearing conehead cosplayers gyrating uncomfortably. Keep in mind this is one of the few hand crafted locations, pretty much everything else is procedurally generated. You also can't even smuggle the drug out for any profit, it's worth the same no matter what planet you bring it to which doesn't make any sense. So locations are not great which brings me to exploration...

Exploration in Starfield is not great. In a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls game you can stumble upon countless interesting hand crafted locations and encounters in the game to the point that getting lost is a good thing. In Starfield you won't stumble upon anything because you fast travel from planet to planet, system to system. So to explore that has to be your express goal. Okay, fine. Except everything is procedurally generated so after you've done it once you're just going to see it copy and pasted on different looking planets. You're not going to find anything new in that cave because it's the same cave. You're not going to find anything interesting on that planet because it's going to have the same stuff as the last one, just with different plants around it and the grounds a different color. Just go system to system looking for content until you get bored with that. They made some decent random encounters that you can have while out in space but not enough of them, I've run into Grandma half a dozen times by now.

And as far as things to do... the ending: Spoilers ahead obviously. It's another multiverse story. I understand 7 years ago when the game began development this concept wasn't quite as tired and cliche as it has become but good God am I sick of multiverses. The whole point of the game is to just replay it again, that's how it ends. I wish I was joking. It's message is basically it's not about the destination, it's about the journey, which is fine but the journey is not good... Unfortunately the game has, to me, no replayability until new content in the form of DLC drops. Which I may not even buy until it goes on sale because I just don't care. The story is that uninteresting.

This is not to say that everything about Starfield is bad. The gun play is actually pretty great though not worth it alone to buy the game. The ship building is actually really fun despite it being janky, probably some of the most fun i've had in the game. Some of the quests are fun like the UC quest line and other shorter, one off quests. They all have the same problems though: if they do offer any interesting ideas they do not fully explore them, they acknowledge them and that's about it. Things like the Well, tensions between the UC and Rangers, and the UC being a fascist state are all explored in only the most superficial terms. Bethesda has always had the problem of being wide as a lake but deep as a puddle and Starfield is unfortunately a prime example of how this problem has only gotten worse with every subsequent Bethesda release since Morrowind.

I did enjoy parts of this game but I cannot recommend it for $70. It is so frustrating to see Bethesda finally get a crack at creating a unique IP that isn't another Elder Scrolls or Fallout game and they make this boring, uninspired whimper of a game. This game is all of Bethesdas bad habits, everything they're bad at and nothing they're good at, finely distilled.

One of the most frustrating things to me is that this game is mediocre, it's not bad like No Mans Sky and it didn't ruin Bethesdas reputation like CP2077 did on release so it's not going to get the attention it needs to be made into great game like those studios did. Chances are post launch will be handled very much like FO4 where we'll get a couple of bug fixes but not nearly enough and a couple of nickle and dime DLCS then one or two really solid ones. They have ES6 to get to work on after all. This means the game will probably not have a miracle come back like those games did and will probably always be mediocre, which I think is a shame because it does have good bones there's just no meat on them.

no WAY this won most innovative gameplay 💀

I played for 75 hours because I needed the dopamine fix. Looking back its a boring story, in a boring world.

Also I CANNOT get over the one mission I thought would be awesome. Finding a ship launched from earth 200 years earlier with the offspring of the original crew finally finding humanity... and they have the same computers with the same operating system on their ship as the rest of the universe. WHY WHY WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

*little update*

Yes I too find it funny that Bethesda AI bot thinks that after 75 hours I wouldnt know about smuggling, outposts, starship customization... yes i've done those absolutely dull and mostly pointless activities. Just cause there are a thousand boring planets to visit, doesnt mean I want to visit them.

A lot of people have rightly pointed out the boring planets, the dull shooting and many of the other issues with this game, but I wanted to point out one of the biggest reasons this game failed to grab my imagination in the way it clearly wanted to; Its combination of sterile and safe storytelling with a bad habit of telling instead of showing.

In New Atlantis, the capitol village-I mean "city" of the United Colonies, the supposed biggest star nation in the setting, you see fully armored riot looking cops patrolling everywhere, then you go down to the Well, the admittedly neat looking pseudo-undercity of New Atlantis, and see graffiti of a UC soldier executing someone with "all hail our benevolent overlords" written sardonically besides it. That paired with loading screen hits of ther UC having "Maybe too many laws" you'd think that this was setting up that the shiny, Star Trek Looking faction that has draped itself in "Good Guy Space America" may have a dark side, even before you find out that they are legit doing United Citizen Federation ♥♥♥♥ of haivng citizenship needing to be earned and necessary for owning a home and other basic things. But then something weird happens....nothing happens, even when you find out a moderate twist during their faction missions, the UC keeps being just a bunch of goody goody folks who just wanna protect civilians. All that lead up of a sinister side is just window dressing.

I thought things would be better once I hit Neon, a City built like a massive oil platform on an ocean planet covered in holograms and neon lights and supposidly riddled with crime and drugs like a nautical Night City? I could not get my spacer ass over there fast enough! It even looked great at first with the lightning strikes hitting the city's sheild, the guards making sure that nobody smuggles out the dangerously addictive drugs that are legal inside the city, all the way to the smokey cyberpunk/nautical town looking streets. But just like New Atlantis and the UC, all this talk of Neon being a dangerous and risky place with crime and corruption all over was just that, a bunch of talk as the place ended up quickly feeling more like a suburban strip mall with bad weather and some corporate branded graffiti to try and look 'street'.

After finishing a questline for the most friendly and well behaved gang ever I set course for the Freestar collective, maybe some space weastern, Serenety style feels would finally immerse me in this game I paid eeventy real life dollars for. Akila City was less offensive in it's broken promises than the previous cities, it sure did feel and look like a sort of Star Wars/Serenity space weastern pastiche and even had a old timey bank robbery going on. But like the rest, all the talk of the super dangerous wildlife constantly at the walls like they were on a death world went unfulfilled in any meaningful way.

The rest of the game feels the same, sterile and safe, pirates who talk cringingly about how they are gonna totally betray you and oh you better not cross them sonny jim but come accross like teenagers from a gated community trying to act hard. Sterile and constantly touching on themes and ideas that it later forgets, Starfield could not make an immersive world if it tried, and thats why after playing through the entire damn thing the most fun I found was helping a clone of Gengis Khan stage a prison break against a clone of FDR and an Egyptian queen because at least that was bafflingly amusing. Seriously if you want a fun space RPG, go play the Outer worlds, it takes you about 30 hours maybe to finish everything but damned if it didn't make me legit feel like a han solo type.

Like the idea of making your own spaceships though, shame about the bloody ladders

Starfield is a pretty mid game even by Bethesda standards and I wasn't even going to write a review on it, but now I feel like I have to. Bethesda is trying to start a trend that will forever damage trust between developers and players and we need to stop it the same way Helldivers 2 players stopped their issues. Here's what you NEED to know:

- Bethesda released the 'Trackers Alliance' content system as part of a free update in June. You cannot decline the addition of this content as it was built into the update.
- It is basically a Starfield take on The Mandalorian where you take/complete bounties as a bounty hunter. Some bounties are wanted alive, some dead, and you can find bounties by scanning people.
- You cannot complete bounties where it is necessary to confront the person via dialogue because it is bugged. Killing them fails the mission and DOES NOT resolve the quest, so there is no way to complete it once it's bugged.
- You can only ever have five (5) bounties, so once you have five bugged NPCs you can no longer get more.

This is broken on the scripting level. It CANNOT be fixed with console commands or mods. It MUST be fixed by Bethesda or someone with enough knowledge in the scripting to fix it at the SFSE modded level.


- Bethesda is going to be releases Trackers Alliance content in the form of Paid DLCs through the Creation Launcher (their in-game hub for mods and stuff). They're releasing it like a mod, basically.
- Because they are releasing it 'like a mod' they can just post a disclaimer saying it may be broken and then they're covered.
- You cannot purchase this stuff on Steam, you can only purchase the 'Creation Credits' to buy the paid DLC in-game even though it is official, paid DLC.
- There is no way to dislike, review, or comment on things in the Creation hub and since it isn't listed as 'DLC', you can't dislike, review, or comment on it on Steam either.
- In essence, there is no way to dislike, review, or comment on it being broken in any capacity. You are literally being sold a broken product and there is no way to even warn people that it is broken outside of reviewing the base game, which I am doing now to inform you of this.

They literally want you to pay $7 for content that is certifiably broken and has been reported as broken hundreds of times on Reddit and might only be able to be fixed by an SFSE mod for PC users only. You can't even dislike/review/comment on it to WARN people about this. The only way I am even able to share this information is by reviewing the base game here on Steam.


DO NOT PURCHASE THE TRACKERS ALLIANCE DLC CONTENT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. It is broken beyond repair and there is no way to refund it once you get it. When - not if - it breaks, there is nothing you can do. Console commands, mods, etc will not fix it and even if they did, they'd only fix it for PC users. There is no way to dislike, review, or comment on it being broken to inform others that it is, in fact, broken. Bethesda has found a loophole by which to release broken, paid DLC where they not only do not have to fix it, they can't be held accountable for it being broken.

Do not let them think that this is at all acceptable or it sets a trend for the whole of the gaming industry.

EDIT: Clarified some things in the second bullet list.

Some Point after the 30th "Collapsed Mine" with the exact same layout, with the exact same corpse placement with the exact same notes on them it just gets old.

Most innovative gameplay has to be ironic, right?

If you’re looking for some screenshots click here to view all the ones I took for this game.




Starting as a miner nobody on a remote planet, your run-of-the-mill ‘deus-ex-machina’ starts when you happen to stumble on a mysterious alien artifact that, coincidentally enough, seems to attune to your person with yet-unknown consequences. MAGIC! It’s the same trope of Skyrim’s Dragonborn, only much less cooler because this time you have a rusted piece of alien metal instead of dragon souls sniffing. And you’re dubbed ‘Starborn’ not long afterwards, because Bethesda writers have a LOT of imagination. From there your journey through the stars starts yadda-yadda-ya - use the Force, Luke, and so on. Boring.

Everything from locations to quests, characters, companions and villains feel terribly generic, underwhelming and soulless. Not once in my nearly 70 hours have I said, in my head, ‘now THIS is interesting’ - or cool, or deep, or mysterious enough to interest me. That’s not going to happen, because trying to please everyone with cookie cutter narratives and character designs ends up pleasing NO ONE.

The world looks cool, and is visually fantastic in its details, especially out in the wild. Interiors, ships and general indoors locations, save for a few, feel generic and same-y, and don’t have the same level of interactivity seen in previous Bethesda games. They even removed the gore system everyone loved. The attempt at a ‘late-hard-sci-fi’ universe fails miserably, because it’s not nearly gritty enough, and doesn’t take itself seriously enough, to be fitting for a true ‘hard sci fi’.

You’ll explore the galaxy using your ship, jumping from system to system, able to land on pretty much any planet that has solid ground. Once disembarked, you’ll proceed on foot and, if you have the right perk, move faster with the aid of a jump pack for additional jump reach and better mobility. Reaching most locations is a tiresome affair, since your running speed will be very slow compared to the distance you’ll have to cross - with very little of interest between you and the next map marker.

Forget all the interesting random encounters of Fallout or Elder Scrolls, those won’t happen on these barren planets. Points of interest range from small outposts to multi-layered facilities, often filled with enemies, containers, loot, locked doors, terminals with lore - the usual. They’re interesting to explore the first time around, however the massive amount of copy-pasting will make them tiresome soon, since very few truly unique ones exist outside of questlines.

Exploration is compounded with a surveying system allowing you to painstakingly scan all resources, animals, elements and flora of each planet and then sell the data for a pittance - that’s not worth doing and takes ages. There are some secrets in the form of hidden locations discoverable only by reading specific documents, or hidden containers inside POIs, but they’re usually underwhelming - exceptions apply.

You’ll be able to use a variety of weapons that either deal physical, energy or EM (stun) damage, and also modify them via workbenches - same goes for armor parts. There are rarity tiers that add passive properties, although most of them are gimmicks not worth grinding Legendary Enemies for. The problem with weapons in Starfield is that they feel too similar to one another, and even ‘unique’ named ones are just normal guns with pre-set modifications and affixes, none of them is TRULY something one of a kind you can’t find anywhere else, powerful and sublime to look for.

Combat gunplay is fine, somewhat on the same level of Fallout 4, but less dynamic, with worse AI, and less gore / impact feel from shots. All enemies you’ll face feel the same, behave the same and LOOK the same because 90% of the time everyone wears spacesuits, even while inside. Except in cities. Companions are brainless meat-shields only useful to carry additional cargo, and the enemy AI is so dumb you’ll have a cake walk if you use a stealth build or just use basic cover. You’ll eventually acquire special powers due to your “chosen” status, which are memes I never really found useful. I’ve fought a total ONE unique boss in 70 hours in a specific quest, the rest were just oversized / renamed / reskinned generic enemies over and over again. FillerField.

Companions are one sided-flat and cringe in most cases. They don’t really seem to react to your personal dispositions in meaningful ways, or to your actions, and when they actually do, you can always persuade them to stick with you for the sake of the plot - God forbid actual freedom of choice. Remember how in say, New Vegas, companions ditched you if you behaved against their values or beliefs, or allied with a faction they hated? That’s not going to happen here, and there isn’t even a Faction reputation system to begin with.

Really? Another push for curated paid mods no one asked for? Are you this desperate for modders to fix your game on a budget, instead of doing it yourself with developers on an actual payroll? This disconnected from the actual foundations of your success your titles have had this far?

There is a simple reason why many players and modders enjoy modding their games for decades: It is done as a hobby, for players by players, without corporate responsibilites and apart from donation opportunities, without asking for or expecting monetary compensation.

You are not aiding modding in the slightest. You are trying to turn modding into a business opportunity, to be a parasite that profits from underpaid work you do not want to do yourselves.

This is another pathetic attempt to generate (read leech) revenue from work that is not your own, by implementing yourself as its monopoly distributor. If this somehow finds acceptance, gamers loose. If this somehow finds acceptance, "unlicensed mods" will eventually get restricted or prohibited in the years to come. Those do not generate perpetual revenue after all.