Starfield Review

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Starfield was my most anticipated game in the recent years but because of the overwhelmingly negative reception and the ridiculously inflated price at the launch, I waited two years to get it and I'm massively disappointed right now. All the problems I encountered existed since the launch and nothing was fixed in those two years. Nothing. The game is still an empty, buggy, broken mess two years after the release and the devs don't seem to care. But the bugs aren't even the main issue: the game is lacking in every aspect and it seems to be by design. Masterpiece my ass. Over-hyped mediocrity is more like it.

As someone said (quote): "every part of Starfield hints at something incredible that never happens".

The game has been produced with minimal effort and maximum hype, it's bare bones, everything just barely works. There is nothing in this game that is great or awesome. Perhaps my expectations were too high? I've been playing PC games for over 30 years, I should know better by know, but I wanted this to be a great game.

This is sad because this game had potential but it's been two years and the potential has not been fulfilled. There are lots of game areas and aspects ripe for improvement and additional "stuff" but it was all ignored by Bethesda. You can tell there is a fairly large amount of detail in the game and many potentially interesting mechanics, but nothing is polished enough, nothing shows any desire to create something awesome. Minimum effort, maximum profit. It is so bad that even mods can't and won't save Starfield the way it happened with Skyrim and Fallout games.

It took me few hours just to get the game modded and configured to some usable, working state. I also restarted few times and did several saves to try different playstyles and to avoid mistakes, like buying a vehicle or acquiring a crew. I really tried hard to enjoy this game. That's where my 100 in-game hours came from: repeated attempts to enjoy the game, but none of the saves was longer than maybe 20 hours and each was filled with frustration. I'll probably start one more save, look up some more mods, and just roam around for a bit ignoring the main story and most quests.

By the way, Starfield really needs an Alternate Start mod like the one for Skyrim, but it's either not possible or not enough modders are interested in doing it.

The game looks good (probably not quite up to par with some of the recent games), runs smoothly, zero crashes, no stutter in hundred hours.

Ground combat is moderately fun for a while. Weapons and equipment (well, suits, helmets and backpacks) are sort of fun to tinker with, assuming you have the patience to find required resources. Few handcrafted locations are fairly interesting and few side quests are fun to some extent but the keyword here is "few". There is just not enough fun things to do in this game to justify the hype and the price, everything else pretty much disappoints every step of the way.

Repetitive, copypasta locations otherwise. Once you saw one Abandoned Research Tower or Deserted Robotics Facility, you have seen all Abandoned Research Towers and Deserted Robotics Facilities. They're all exactly the same down to enemy placements, NPC notes and loot locations. What makes it worse is that the environments are very detailed and look really good so with some added variety this could have been a blast, but it's not. And they have the balls to ask $80 for this rubbish. Something like this might be acceptable in a certain 9 years old indie game that goes on sales for $20 on Steam, but not for a new $80 game from an AAA studio.

Repetitive space encounters too. There is like five of them that repeat ad nauseam... I lost count (and started ignoring them) how many times I ran into a colonist with dead Grav Drive, a grandma inviting me over for a meal or Parcel Delivery ship in distress asking me to deliver a package (because that's what parcel delivery people do in the future: they come up to a random stranger asking them to deliver their valuable package, facepalm).

Loading screens everywhere. I know, this horse has been beaten to death, but I'll kick it some more, just to be sure. You can't go couple of minutes without seeing a loading screen in this game. Walk between rooms? Loading screen.

Immersion ruining fast travel. You can fast travel from the interior of an underground store to a planet surface in a star system tens of light years away with few mouse clicks, you don't even have to get into your ship or even get outside. I mean, I surely don't want long, mind-numbing space flights like in Elite Dangerous, but at least make getting into your ship a requirement for fast space travel. This kills immersion in a big way.

After playing No Man's Sky for over 2000 hours I find it painful not to be able to fly my ships to/from/over planets in this game. It's just such a massively missed opportunity. It would change the game.

The UI/UX and the controls are atrociously awful, terrible. I lack words to properly describe how much it sucks on a PC if you play with mouse and keyboard and it requires multiple mods to make the game somewhat playable. Still, even with StarUI mods the game UI/UX is horrible, unsolvable key conflicts, clunky and unresponsive screens, the game UI shows wrong keys or keys that don't exist on my keyboard. When I press T to target, I sometimes get up from the pilot seat even though E is assigned to "get up". Why is "hail" and "target" the same key too? When I'm on-foot, on planet surface, and press the map key I get the space map. WTF? I have never seen UI this bad in a PC game... since Skyrim. I see a pattern here. I could never get into Fallout games because of the UI/UX either.

Most side quests are utterly boring, pointless and uninteresting and feel like chores. Looooong and boring dialogues and monologues. Very poor writing at times. I expected a sci-fi RPG and way too often the side quests are gang wars or boring corporate shenanigans.

WARNING: SERIOUS SPOILERS!

Dumb, boring, uninteresting, unsatisfying and tragically disappointing main story. From the start, the game is setting you up for something awesome and building up expectations of something cool: alien temples, alien artifacts, unknown technology, lost alien civilization... and what do we get? A bunch of entitled human assholes with issues who think they know what's good or bad for the Humanity. This was easily the worst, most anticlimactic, most disappointing letdown of a story in any game I played in the recent memory. Who built these temples and who created the artifacts? Whatever. Creators? Unimportant. I stopped several times and had to force myself to continue, so just I can see the pointless "ending".

There is some interesting lore and there are few side quests that would have made for a much better story than the nonsense we got as the main storyline in this game.

Inconsequential player actions and nonsensical story developments. So, there are giant alien temples with floating rocks in inhabited systems, people living nearby, even tourists taking pictures of them (yes, there was a dude with a camera boasting about his photos next to an alien temple I just walked out of after acquiring superpowers) and... nobody cares? Nobody talks about these? UC, Freestar, Va-ruun, the pirates or Ryujin Industries are not interested at all in *numerous* ancient alien structures scatter across the Settled Systems??? Constellation is collecting floating alien artifacts that defy human science and UC intelligence didn't catch the wind of that? Seriously? Even Skyrim had people trying to learn about the Dwemer mystery.

I can belong to all factions at the same time, even when they're at odds with one another, and nobody minds? People build outposts and labs on planets roamed by literal monsters that require advanced weapons to be killed. And I don't mean Terrormorphs, I came across large labs, outposts, farms wiped out by giant alien bugs. Nobody knew the planet was deadly to humans??? No defenses were set up??? Stupidity like this was fine 15 years in Skyrim but these days we want more meaningful, more nuanced, more immersive and more consequential writing and player choices in RPGs. This is insulting to the gamer.

There are many broken quests too, including some big ones, that can't be completed because an NPC gets stuck or a dialogue option is missing or an item or an object is missing/unreachable, they're broken since the game release, nothing got fixed.

As already said, most of the game mechanics either feel half baked, unpolished or are half broken. NPCs walk into walls, get stuck on objects and moon-walk all the time and they are often difficult to interact with unless you stand at a very specific angle and at a very specific distance, spam the interaction key and wait literally several seconds for the game logic to realize that the player is attempting to interact with an NPC.

Enemy AI is terrible too. You can kill everybody with grenades in the room while the enemies in the next room won't react all. You can walk up to a bad guy, fire your weapon into a pile of crates next to him and he won't move at all or will start moon-walking into a wall. This seems to be an indoor thing though, as outside enemies are more attentive and reactive to your presence.

I can walk into someone's office, with security guards standing right outside, steal everything in the office, crack open their safe and walk out with zero consequences.

Like, really?

That level of crappy game design was fine 15 years ago in Skyrim but not in 2025.

Loooong NPC dialogues that even with mods are hard to skip entirely. Within few hours, I was sick and the tired of the vendors repeating their crap over and over every time I wanted to offload some loot. Speaking of vendors, they never have enough money to buy your loot. I mean, an interstellar trading company can only buy couple of guns and foodpacks from me at a time? This isn't Skyrim any more! Also, you have to pay like 80-90% of a ship's value to "register it" so you can sell it for the remaining 10-20%. Again, mods were needed to fix broken game design.

Ship building could be fun, there is definitely potential there, but even with mods the UI is clunky, tries to second guess me, moving and zooming the ship around and constantly gets in the way, mods help to some degree but can't save the experience entirely. You can't fly the ships anyway, except for brief periods of space combat, so what is the point of building ships anyway? Oh, and I can't rename half of the ships I bought or commandeered, the new name just doesn't stick.

Garbage vehicles. Literally unusable. I don't even understand why they exists in the game. I know there were no vehicles at release and they added them later and they're so half-assed it hurts. And once you make the mistake of buying a vehicle, you can't get rid of them. The vehicle always spawns in the front of the ship upon landing, want it or not, and often gets stuck on or clips through nearby items, if you have a large ship, and shakes violently. The vehicles should be attached to a buildable ship module and the player should have a choice to activate or deactivate them. The vehicles are called "ships" in the vendor's UI so that tells you how half-baked and rushed this feature is.

Outpost building is a terrible joke, like vehicles: unusable garbage, exacerbated by the terrible UI, easily the most stupid build system I have ever seen in a PC game. I can't freelook with mouse, instead, moving the mouse forward and backward zooms in and out and I can't reassign zoom to the mouse wheel, where it belongs. WTF??? Where did they see a game mechanics like this??? Who designed this stupidity? Tried, installed some mods, gave up after few minutes.

Followers are annoying and bugged. I'm escaping with one guy from a collapsing underground prison, just the two of us. We commandeer an old prison shuttle and leave the planet, just the two us, right? Nope. Sarah is on the ship telling me we achieved orbit and then that she has something for me. How the hell did she get on the ship? Where is the immersion??? This is garbage.

Sarah and Barret stop in the middle of gunfights, all the damn time, or even interrupt other dialogues in progress, and they want to talk to me about something important or to tell me that they have something for me. Poor or lazy game design.

On another occasion all my generic hired crew, the unnamed, random "specialists", just vanished, all of them. Two named crews remained but all others were just gone. This is garbage too.

I saved a pilot from the Ecliptic mercs during a quest to retrieve a ship and he just never leaves me! I can't get rid of him! I don't want him on my crew. I said no, no time for this. He responds that he'll be at the Viewport bar if I want to talk to him. But then he follows me everywhere. He's not a part of my crew. I never accepted him. He was supposed to be seating at Viewport. I fly into space alone, land on a planet, get up from the pilot seat and he's standing in the cockpit wanting to talk to me. Garbage like this kills any chances at immersion in this pseudo-RPG.

I equipped my followers with space suits and some weapons. They randomly take them off and run around airless planets without spacesuits and helmets, wearing just normal clothing. Immersion again? Hello?

Some will say that "all Bethesda games are like that". First, Starfield is particularly bad even by Bethesda's standards. Second, this was fine 15, 20 years ago, not in the current times. Bethesda is stuck in the past and not even making any effort to improve. This was the last time I bought a Bethesda game.

Then I remembered that Bethesda is now owned by Microsoft, by the way of ZeniMax, and that explains everything. Microsoft can't even make a decently usable PC operating system any more and they never understood PC gaming anyway. They keep buying gaming IP and ruin it every single time.

So, Starfield could have been really great. But it would require a developer and a publisher that care and some serious updates, patches and fixes, NMS style. But, instead, we got really bad, cash-grab DLC that added nothing new to the game, didn't address any problems with the base game. Look what Hello Games has done to No Man's Sky. NMS has way more daily players on Steam after nearly nine years than Starfield does only after two years. Will anyone be playing Starfield nine years from now? Doubtful, as even many modders are giving up on this game.

No, Microsoft doesn't want you play Starfield for another nine years, why would they? They cashed in early on the hype, sold enough copies to meet their numbers and they're no longer interested in improving the game. They'll try to fool us again into buying another overpriced, half-assed, over-hyped "masterpiece" and the sad part is that people will fall for it again...

Starfield is one of the biggest letdowns in the entire PC gaming history. Sadface.

-- Henry Lootgraab