TL;DR: Consider me… whelmed. Not overwhelmed, not underwhelmed. Just whelmed.

The initial few hours of Starfield are incredibly weak. Like, insultingly bad for a Bethesda game. I had no sense of grounding in the game world like with Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 3, or even Oblivion. After an hour or so, you get dumped into New Atlantis, which is the Starfield equivalent of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Hinterlands. There is plenty of things to do in the city, all of which you absolutely should not be doing. Not to say the quests are bad per se, but I felt myself burning out of the game after sessions 2 and 3 were all just questing in the city with zero combat.

I decided to break away from New Atlantis and things began to improve. Following the main quest, I get to Mars. Instead of going to the bar where the quest wants me to go, I instead strike out towards an unknown marker. Looks like some kind of rocket structure. I see a spaceship just sitting nearby… so I steal it. The devs have a heavy thumb on the economic scale in this game, so while you can certainly steal a better ship than you have, it costs like 90% of the sell price of a ship to register it, which you need to pay before you can sell it (or customize it). My profit is like 1700 credits, which is the equivalent of selling four guns from dead pirates.

I fast travel back to the rocket pad, climb all the way to the top, which it seems like the devs intended. At the very tippy-top, I see three chests up there containing common gun drops and ammo. Yay.

That is when it hits me. “Exploration” only happens in instanced content in Starfield. Had this been a Fallout title, there would have been a skeleton up there or some other environmental storytelling (audio log, etc). Had this been Elder Scrolls, there may have been some Daedric portal or a unique item or something. The rocket pad is a Point of Interest, yes, but I will no doubt be seeing similar rocket pads across the 1000s of planets in the game, and they all need to have a chest at the tippy-top.

Or maybe I am wrong, and the launch pad on Mars was specifically hand-crafted. In which case… yikes.

On my next play session, I go into the bar as intended. Along the way, I overhear a conversation about how some miners are being turned away by the mining supervisor. I talk with him, and he asked me to mine some Iron “off the books” so that it looks like his team exceeded quota and thus will get approval to some badly-needed upgraded equipment. I do that, and now he’s asking me to become an executive assistant to “help” the Fiscal manager to sign the paperwork. No doubt there will be further shenanigans in the space station as I try to get the request approved.

The above is the type of thing I’m actually impressed with while playing the game: mundane-sounding side-quests end up becoming more involved and interesting. There are a tons of these and you can do them or not do them at your leisure. It makes the game world feel a bit more alive and interconnected. As opposed to the literal game world, which is dead and fragmented by loading screens.

Having said all that, I am becoming increasingly okay with it. In Buddhism, “unfulfilled expectations” are the root of all suffering. In a recent Starfield play session, I cleared out a random den of Spacers on Mars, went outside, fast traveled to New Atlantis and off-loaded my loot to vendors, then fast traveled back to the Martian surface to continue looting the building. Is that, strictly speaking, dumb game design? Yes. Is it all that different than fast traveling to vendors in any other Bethesda game? Er… no. It only feels dumb because I have some unfulfilled expectations that this is a good game space games are necessarily immersive sims that play out more like No Man’s Sky.

I dunno. I typically do not mod games on a first playthrough, but I’m feeling like maybe giving myself 1000 more carry weight might actually make the game more immersive than leaving it as-is.