Fixing Starfield: The Definitive Review

Starborn Reborn?

As I’m coming to the end of Shattered Space and considering what it means for the attempted rehabilitation of Starfield, it’s really quite fascinating to watch the discourse on Reddit, where r/Games and r/Starfield enjoy similar bunfights of conflicting opinions on why Starfield is shit and whether or not it can be saved. Naturally, r/NoSodiumStarfield is filled with grinning idiots like me, who love the game unconditionally. But in all the arguing, there seem to be two factions emerging. One which thinks the game can be altered to be amazing, and the other that thinks it’s an intractably fundamental issue - be that via the game engine’s obvious limitations or the general interactive design. It’s interesting to see more complaints arising from things like the quests being lacklustre, or the planets being boring, which both point to content rather than design issues. For my money, it absolutely is content that’s at fault here and even though Shattered Space has some good shit, it’s not really redressing any balances or making up for long-standing deficiencies.

Naturally, Bethesda staff have taken to the media, both gaming and social, to plead their cases. I have to say, their defences have been generally <<ill advised>>. Design director Emil Pagliarulo being the most visible here, launching a twitter thread of replies to a highly critical tweet that I suppose lapses into a kind of defiant apologia more than anything else. Previously he’d claimed that “in some ways” Starfield is the best game Bethesda has ever made. Even with my unconditional love fully aflame, I can’t agree with that in design terms. I mean sure, the textures might be the best? Ummm, adding spaceship building makes it functionally ‘better’ than Skyrim or Fallout 4? But in all seriousness, Emil seems incapable of truly acknowledging many of the gaping issues at Starfield’s core. One suspects said issues may in fact be down to career-deciding decisions he may have personally made. Anyway for Emil, Shattered Space is absolutely brilliant. He goes as far as saying the quests are good because of ‘argument from authority’ reasons. No really, he says they’re good because old quest designers did them. He even invoked Morrowind to qualify this. I have to say that having undertaken and completed nearly all the available quests in Shattered Space, they’re pretty fucking average to me and by and large, outclassed by a fair few quests from the base game. What’s perhaps superior is the environmental modelling if, like me, you have a perverse fetish for militaristic underground facilities. Shattered Space has some amazing ones, including a sweet horror-lab with blood all over the place. It’s quite the grisly delight, even if it mystifyingly puts a huge amount of effort into foreshadowing the creation of enemies you will have already encountered by the time you get there. But that’s such a typically Bethesda touch that I don’t begrudge that. No, I begrudge other things.

What’s confusing for me is how Bethesda can devote a year to Shattered Space and yet, as mentioned in my facile semi-review, basic functionality that’s perfectly natural to expect is still missing. Yes, I’m talking about modding clothing. This seems so obvious, such an easy win to implement, that I cannot understand why it’s not available. I can only presume it’s to push per-item mods onto the Creations store, which would be an incredibly bad and stupid thing to do. With community goodwill falling well below rapturous adulation, you’d think (as stated by Emil) that the company’s asserted attention to community outcry would deliver some of these features. And here lies the first big fix.

1. Stop work on everything and pay attention to things you had in Fallout 4 and Skyrim that aren’t in Starfield to bring it to parity

I’m prepared to bet actual money that bringing in pre-existing crafting options that are absent in Starfield would go a good way to lifting community spirit. The question here has always been “why the fuck are they absent anyway?”. It’s completely nonsensical to offer a space suit crafting table but be unable to change the colours of a set of clothing or add, swap, remove abilities and bonuses. Likewise, colours for everything else. I can choose colours for spacecraft parts from a free palette, but have to download fucking skins from Creations to colour guns? Why? The frustrating part is Bethesda’s silence on their absence and a total lack of any roadmap for adding them. This extends to deeper aesthetic customisation across the board. For example, we get a few facial trinkets from Neon with fairly useless bonuses, but seemingly the Starfield universe has no need for actual jewellery, which could also carry super-cool effects and bonuses and thereby offer additional loot incentives¹. Is there some way of translating the enchanting system of Skyrim into Starfield stuff? Was it even considered? At the very least, there needs to be a recognition that Starfield simply isn’t up to parity with the other two in terms of these customisation systems and there’s plenty of goodwill to be earned in bringing it up to specs that are over ten years old. But hey, Starfield needs work on new stuff, too.

2. Dedicate a big content release to fleshing out the vestigial shit that currently only serves to disappoint

If you take certain options in a certain faction questline, you get access to a secret bastard who gives you assassination missions. Now the denouement of all this is superb, a bit of brilliantly economical Bethesda magic that pulls back the curtain of that faction’s purported respectability to reveal a kind of deep-state darkness lurking in the shadows. Your first visit wonderfully expands not only the facility it’s hidden in, but the wider sense of geopolitical realpolitik underlying the factional frictions in the game’s lore. And lo, as you finally meet this brand new, unexpected mission-giver, they hand you something equally unexpected: a completely dull and boring ‘go here and kill someone’ mission. These feel identical to the Tracker’s Alliance mission board entries and offer no special rewards. At the very least you’d expect the target to be super-levelled, dropping super-levelled gear, but no; they’re devastatingly ordinary. Now, this feels like it should have been Starfield’s Dark Brotherhood, a secret questline of gritty assassinations to maintain some deep conspiracy or whatever. But there’s literally no differentiation from the mission board, only that it takes much longer to acquire a mission. This is so unbelievably counter-productive that it’s emblematic of that deeper failure at the game’s core. There’s too many things that are boringly implemented. Why not have a bonus scheme of ‘complete three missions without being detected and get a cool bit of stealth gear’? Much like the post-questline Ryujin missions, they offer so little in terms of challenge and reward that there’s almost no point in doing them. Ryujin being the equivalent of the Thieves' Guild. Like the assassinations, why not add non-detection requirements? Or force the acquisition of certain costumes to gain access to the shit you need to steal? Maybe even correct spacecraft to land or dock at secure locations. Did Bethesda simply not bother, or did they run out time? If so, why? Again, it’s part of this clouded opacity, a kind of denial to engage with explaining what went wrong in case it means admitting the game is flawed in a way it really shouldn’t be. Bethesda's refusal to acknowledge these shortcomings absolutely fuels rejection (and cements it) and only increases community indignancy. The entire posture really should change. Fess up, explain, and expand these shallow and insubstantial threads with decent stuff. Please!

3. Release a browser-based POI configurator to engage the community to create a shitload of POI variations 

If you read the Reddit and Twitter and Bluesky threads, or dare to plumb the badlands of YouTube and TikTok comments, a common point in ‘how to fix Starfield’ is to add more Points Of Interest. I have no problem with that whatsoever - the emptiness of the tabula rasa planets, which are perhaps the primary target for Starfield haters, is down to repeated POIs being scattered too sparsely. But I think the problem really lies with their configuration. It’s still absolutely mindfucking to me that the Muybridge Pharmaceuticals installation should pop up on nearly every star system.² Now the installation itself is fine. With space exploration, you’d expect the same kind of pre-fab buildings to be commonplace. What you don’t expect is to find the same config of props on the interior - and once again, Bethesda doesn’t even seem to acknowledge that this is even a problem. So, my proposal is to let the community configure prefabbed POIs. Allow us to place enemies and configure them, place props, write log entries, hide keys to doors with configured loot crates behind them, hide hostage NPCs that need to be freed, hide special items that need to be returned to authorities and so on. I’m fairly confident this could be done in a pretty simple 2D web interface, and that these could be checked fairly easily for viability. If you can generate a precis based on the config, the community could vote for which ones they’d like to play, which are then offered for community QA via Creations³ before being adopted into the formal canon. And I’d incentivise all this with coins for the Creations store. I’m assuming, of course, that the config for a POI runs to less than a megabyte or two, bespoke text included, so adding tranches of these on a weekly or monthly basis wouldn’t bloat the Starfield install, but would inject lots of distinctly individual content that requires zero new assets. However I do have one utterly bonkers and radical idea that would require a fuckton of asset work.

4. Abandon failed conceits and flip the whole fucking table on the player

If I was given the reins and the budget to remould Starfield and launch it into the RRR stratosphere, I’d commit to transgressions so extreme, it might break the Universe. Yes, the Starfield Universe. Because I’d have the player pulled out of Starfield to be revealed that they’re a colonist being revived on a colony craft orbiting a planet long after the Earth has been destroyed. More of my sloppy lore is in the footnote here: ⁴ It’s revealed that Starfield is a rehabilitation game played by colonists as they slowly regain consciousness, which helps define their eventual real-world role, and that the real colony below needs you to go down and see if you can find information that orbital AIs need. The game switches from Starfield’s ruleset to a similar Bethesda open-worlder template, but with absolutely intense hard sci-fi rigour - and brutally so. Survival mode is always on, traversal is full of peril, death comes quickly and easily, but there’s always re-cloning to save the day. It turns out that all the factions in Starfield exist in this new reality, but are all on the same planet. And you’re able, eventually, to visit the landmark faction cities, which are much the same structurally as the Starfield in-game ones. However, the population density now makes sense and much more naturalistic and mature mission content is the order of the day. The cool part is that the currency in this new reality is for powering AI-created nanotechnology machines called nanofacture. And even cooler is that any item you have within Starfield is nanofacturable in the new world - for a price. That includes weapons, outfits, outposts, ships etc. The new world opens up to reveal a planetary system that can be explored, but for again for a price - grav jumps are one-time-only affairs and limited to that planetary system, because that’s all the AIs can produce. If you want to visit another planet or moon, either get a lift or if you have your own ship you’d better have saved enough to take two drives to get you home again. Or maybe risk it in the hope you’ll be able to find or nanofacture a drive at your destination, or hitch a lift with someone else. The main storyline is in finding out if the AIs are telling the truth about the lore (see footnote), the truth about their limitations in developing tech, and to see if in fact humanity can reclaim its primacy. Could we take control of the colony craft and its sleeping (or enslaved?) population, and its navigational, technological secrets? Or are the AIs actually as benevolent as they appear? Maybe, just maybe, we can find the discoveries to make those grand steps towards the stars. This new mode would let you swap between the hardcore ‘overworld’ and the traditional Starfield as you wish, although the emphasis between authored content and procedural would split, with the overworld gaining the authored stuff and Starfield getting the procedural bits. This massive gesture not only justifies all the jank in Starfield in much the same way that the plot holes and hyperbole of OG Total Recall are explained by the implanted fantasy, but directly addresses that chasmic betrayal between grandiose promise and delivered reality that mars any sense of realism in Starfield’s capitals. If you consider casting the real world in the hues of Blade Runner 2049 or Death Stranding to give a windswept, rain-sodden sense of the grittily real, the bright, painterly palettes of Starfield’s capitals makes for a nice contrast of escapist refuge. It also gives Starfield a truly modern space to expand into, unbound by the aging confines of its engine. This is because if done correctly, the overworld can be built much more according to the capabilities of technology. The capabilities of the writers to make the most of the potential remains unseen.

6) In-game animal pets that eavesdrop on you, record what you do and then comment about it on your social media profiles without your consent

I mean, doesn’t everyone want that? What? No? Really? Man, we are not the same.

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1. A big complaint I have with Starfield is how shit the loot is once you’re past a certain level. But this is down to a lack of desirable items. Accessories that confer combat effects or skill bonuses would go a long way to addressing that lack.

2. Or, dare we mention, the dreaded CRYO LAB.

3. In short, the Creations mod places all the contending POIs on a single planet so they can be tested quickly.

4. SO OK, RIGHT, GET THIS. In the future, astronomers work out a technique for predicting planet-cleansing gamma ray bursts (which are real btw) and realise the Earth is getting wiped in the next century. Cue a colony craft filled with a million human brains (yes, just the brains) in hibernation, that's sent off on a ten-thousand-year journey to the nearest habitable planet. The technology to re-body these brains into either biological clones or biology-aping robots exists and it doesn't really matter which one we pick. ANYWAY the special factor is that the colony ship is commanded by a cohort of AIs that continue to research technology during the millennia-long journey. When you wake up, the planet below has been populated by re-bodied humans for centuries, and the AIs have advanced technology along the lines they could, but a lack of knowledge (or specific blocks from their human creators) means no interstellar star drives. YET. It turns out you’ve only been woken up because a consciousness on the planet has been permanently lost, and the AIs like to keep the colonist population at a fixed number. There’s nothing particularly special about your character, they are not part of some destiny, a special chosen one or anything. But you will be contacted by underground resistances keen to sever the AI link because you’re new and unaffiliated. YES, YES it’s a bit like that Tom Cruise film Oblivion but that was pretty cool, you know? I liked Elysium too. There’s a bit of that to it perhaps. AND THAT’S FINE.