The Early Starfield Reviews Are In
To be clear, I have not played Starfield – the Game Pass version is not out yet. However, there is a Reddit megathread with many of the top review sites linked. Verdict? Mostly good. Ish. A fewer big outlets like GameSpot, PC Gamer, and IGN have given it 7/10 scores though.
One common complaint about the game is the disjointedness of fast travel. There are 1,000 planets to land on in the game, but the actual landing bit is a cut-scene and/or menu prompt.
At first, this seemed like a silly complaint to me, especially when people compared it to No Man’s Sky. Yes, there is an element of fidelity to the simulation in NMS when you fly towards a planet, break through the atmosphere, and then choose to land literally wherever. But that is something they have to incorporate because the fundamental gameplay is so repetitive and shallow. If you could just instantly warp to a Point of Interest, you would “consume” everything it had to offer within 30 seconds and then be done with all the, e.g. language unlocks in an afternoon. Heading back out into space feels good, yes, but its function is padding.
The criticism harder to shake off is when the reviewers point out how segmented exploration gets vis-a-vis fast travel. You may have seen this Skyrim meme before:
That is absolutely something that happened to me while playing Skyrim. Or the times you are just wandering around and stumble across a faction fight, or bandit camp, or whatever else. There are bandit camps in Starfield, and (presumably) faction fights, and other similar events. But the nature of the game would appear to make these things less organic. They just appear on the planet menu. And so I can see how that could become an issue with some people, and possibly myself.
That said… we’ll see. I have always been a proponent of flying in MMOs despite that encouraging the exact behavior I was describing, e.g. drop in and drop out gameplay. I don’t necessarily feel the need for the NMS flying around if the destinations and Points of Interest are themselves are a worthy goal. And if planet exploration is just the equivalent of driving around with the Mako in Mass Effect, we can… just not do that.
Again, time will tell. I have been looking forward to Starfield for a long time and I love sci-fi as a setting and Bethesda games in general. I’m not quite sure why they felt the need to add 1000 planets though.
Posted on September 1, 2023, in Commentary and tagged Bethesda, No Man's Sky, Sci-Fi, Skyrim, Space, Starfield. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
In An Age 
I don’t typically enjoy Sci-Fi as a setting, but do like Bethesda games, so this one is interesting to me. Elder Scrolls in space I could dig. Not-exactly ES RPG with a Sci-Fi theme starts to push away from what I want. No doubt going to play this at some point, but not burning to do so right now.
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“At first, this seemed like a silly complaint to me, especially when people compared it to No Man’s Sky. (…) Heading back out into space feels good, yes, but its function is padding.”
Eh, I get it. At some point, if the padding feels good enough, it becomes viable content.
I realise I’m a bit of an NMS stan, but if I’m in the right mood, that feeling of total continuity between space and surface is really immersive. I’d be saddened if NMS ever took it away to let people get to quests on the surface quicker. (Though I do appreciate the intersystem teleporters.)
Funnily enough, NMS has been adding more stuff to do at an impressive clip – co-op missions, time-limited expeditions with little stories, creature ships, proper surface towns which you can end up leading, robo-companions, freighter exploration, freighter bases, an attempt at the big social hub, doubtless other things I’m not remembering – and it’s actually reaching an uncanny point where the content is not good enough for the kind of game it’s becoming, yet it’s losing something of the mystique of the cold, sparse, uncaring, yet infinitely diverse vastness of space that made it appealing in the first place.
Less can be more.
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I concede that I was being unfairly harsh of NMS with that paragraph.
I actually like NMS quite a bit, although my last time playing was Oct 2020. The problem I have with it is that it is so tantalizingly close to what I’m looking for in a survival-crafting game without quite getting past the finish line. There appears to have been at least a half-dozen major updates since 2020, but have they squared the circle of peaceful exploration of planet surfaces with the gritty, hardcore fighting of outer space? That dissonance always bothered me, especially on a purely mechanical level, where you could spend hours and hours upgrading your weapons – grenade launchers and all – only to never have a real use for them. Meanwhile, you damn well better upgrade your ship because the universe was extremely hostile in the skies. I would rather have the surface be a constant struggle for survival and space be the respite. At least then the very satisfying mech suit would justify itself.
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Agreed, carrying a gun that sometimes feels downright Chekhovian is a problem. I just think there also exists such a thing as genre creep that leads nowhere good.
As to whether it’s improved now: tentative ‘yes’. Ambushes are relatively few (and usually a consequence of kicking a hornet’s nest) but there are objectively more things to fight on the planets (and on space structures using the personal combat kit) than there used to be, and definitely more incentives to go and seek them out. Settlement defence is a thing, titan worms and other biohorrors have been added, the Sentinels have been beefed up and variegated. And, in the worst case, you can always turn on PvP, and seek out other people who live and breathe arms-optimisation.
On topic, though: having now watched a little over an hour of Starfield gameplay, it a) hits more like a NASA-themed Fallout-lite than like Elder Scrolls; and b) the reviews are right, it’s too surface-bound and needs more actual space stuff happening in space. It doesn’t feel like much of a space exploration game at all, though seeing the whole variety of landscapes, fauna, etc., might well change my mind – or the stories will be strong enough that I won’t care.
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