Starfiled: The Exclusive Definitive Review
Either you’re with the program, or you’re just a terrible human being.
Contradiction is a wonderful thing. It allows mathematical proofs1. Just about everybody sees some deep injustice in at least one, contradiction’s existence in general spurs all kinds of worthwhile activity, despite how infuriating those contradictions might be. In Starfield’s case, the contradictions run as deep as they do in any Bethesda game but for the purposes of this waffle, the main contradiction is all mine. On the one hand, it feels unbearably difficult to write about a game I’ve been waiting six years for2, and yet on the other it seems incredibly easy. Dear reader, I fucking adore this game. But then I was always pretty assured that I would, partly because Bethesda is quite predictable, and partly because BGSOWR3 in space is the second best thing I can imagine4.
And BGSOWR in space is exactly what Starfield is. And it’s glorious. There’s an expected visual uptick from last-gen efforts, which is entirely welcome. As for other markers of being on the cutting edge, not so much. I guess the volume of stuff, perhaps? The breadth5 of content? To put it frankly, there’s no redefinition here, no steps beyond familiar envelopes. Thankfully Baldur’s Gate 3 is doing an admirable job of carrying the RPG torch to loftier climes, but in a sense, should we really have expected Starfield to push any boundaries? Why would we assert that such a title should be so obliged? We can safely say one thing; get a new fucking engine. There’s something assuredly 360/PS3 about the frequency of loadscreens, giving it an almost retro pace. None of them are obnoxiously long enough to needle me, or at least they aren’t on my battered Series S. That’s the Series S I bought not long after Microsoft bought Zenimax, purely because Microsoft had bought Zenimax. I committed to Game Pass because of Starfield’s new destination.
As I said, I’ve waited six years for Starfield, and being suitably jaded with the games industry, am all too aware that a game like this is a once-in-a-generation event. I don’t expect to see this matched before the next round of hardware, which could mean Starfield 2 is a decade away. And going by the current vogues, I don’t expect anything to reach parity with what Bethesda is offering. I can’t trust Obsidian to make Outer Worlds 2 the New Vegas of Starfield, because I simply don’t think they’re allowed the money. Nor do I expect any sequel to, or continuation of, No Man’s Sky to offer the same leisurely stealth>murder>loot loops that Starfield has in spectacular abundance. With that in mind, I clutch Starfield to my bosom like a lost kitten. There’s a vulnerability in its gameplay concept’s uniqueness that makes it an endangered species. Starfield bears some curious similarities with Cyberpunk 20776 in feel, as if the two are offshoot hybrids. Both designs being too big and cumbersome to recreate across the myriad settings such a design could apply to. And yet too special, too rich, too luxurious to be allowed to die. Such is the status of the open world RPG that dares to step beyond a Western fantasy tradition.
Perhaps the most sage take on Starfield is the trite observation that if you liked the Bethesda Fallouts and Elder Scrolls games, then you’ll love the game. If you don’t, you won’t. I think it really is that simple. A fan will accept the minor shortcomings to swim deeply in the sheer wealth of content. My heart skipped with glee at every bifurcation of attention in those first few hours, my quest log rapidly filling with shit to see, people to meet, things to do. My constantly-professed obsession with gear acquisition and levelling is the chief propulsive force right now. Once I’ve got the gear, I’m going to get an idea. And that means exploiting everything I can to get to max level and optimal gadgetry, whilst having as much fun as possible along the way. It’s a grand plan, possibly accounting for hundreds of hours of play. To have such a rich path ahead of me is such nourishment, such a glorious slice of leisure, that I can overlook any technical raggedness or interface clunk. I can settle into this blanket for most of the autumn, and feel entirely comfortable in its embrace. But for the non-believer, I genuinely pity you. I have thoughts on this that I may write about separately, namely the factional divide between player-determined and author-determined play narratives, where I suspect those unable to find harmony and carve a life within Bethesda’s worlds are perhaps too reliant on having an authority ploughing their furrow. For me, I will always want to dig through the soil under my own means, in whatever direction the game allows. And Starfield seemingly allows me to get what I want very easily. With four or five bounty hunter missions under my belt, I had the stealth skills and equipment to settle into a glorious loop, with every one of those bounty locales offering at least one other installation to cleanse of baddie pirates and rinse for loot. All in that simply wonderful, hard-edged NASA/Roscosmos hyperfunctional aesthetic7. I took deep satisfaction in standing on vast grey fields of regolith, cautiously observing a solidly believable installation, its intricate architecture carrying the same brutalist authenticity as, say, the mining base in Moon. It’s safe to say that Bethesda’s visuals have graduated from the somewhat sixth-form visual styles of their Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles. And the atmosphere this creates is fabulous, another chime with Cyberpunk 2077 that’s entirely welcome.
By far the most welcome aspect of Starfield is its hybridisation. The inclusion of space sim features is a lovely expansion, and one that I feel justifies the claim that Starfield is a serious progression from the fairly staid run from Morrowind to Fallout 4. All of those were quite insular; side activities rarely strayed from the core design. Aside perhaps the base-building aspects from Skyrim DLC and Fallout 4. Starfield’s inclusion of space flight, trading, planetary exploration, mining etc, all have obvious predecessors but I don’t think their inclusion is a weakness. On the contrary, it’s proving that we could, if we wanted, deploy the BGSOWR to all manner of pre-existing gaming settings. Stretch your minds a little and consider a similar marriage with the tone and style of Gran Turismo. Dare we ever think of an historical Call Of Duty embedded in a grand Bethesda structure? Certainly, the march of progress benefits hugely from hybrids and, for my money, the wilder the better8.
To close, let’s get sentimental. There is something profoundly resonant in Starfield that genuinely touches my soul. For it represents the realisation of long-held dreams, those wild fantasies of childhood. In so many ways, No Man’s Sky came incredibly close but just fell off when it came to the deeper meat of exploration and exploitation that Bethesda admirably wields. Back in the mid-1980s, I was thrilled by the experience of two separate games. Braben and Bell’s Elite should need no introduction, but Woakes’ Mercenary probably does. For where No Man’s Sky9 works as a kind of adjunct to Elite’s conceptual potential, Mercenary brings the grounded exploration of installations and the acquisition of personal equipment, rather than bits for your ship. You see, Mercenary was a game so ahead of its time, it’s almost the first ever 3D First Person Adventure10. Tasking the player with escaping the central city of the planet Targ, Mercenary had underground complexes, items to collect, keys for locked doors, upgrades for ships. It had above ground flying, a full city map and a floating colony craft. It even had factions to exploit. As you can probably imagine, playing this in 1986 was mind-blowing, but like Elite, Mercenary completely redefined my understanding of the videogame. My sense of where the horizon really lay, and how far out we could reach. I don’t think I’ve ever had my boundaries pushed to quite the same degree since, nor have I been inspired to dream of future games to come with such depth and invigoration, thanks to Paul Woakes’ sheer ambition to create the seemingly impossible. Mercenary was truly like a 21st-Century game arriving from the future. Starfield represents a colossal milestone along the path that Mercenary and Elite offered us to follow. Lest we forget Damocles and Starglider 2 on the 16-bits, then Frontier11, Homeworld, Freespace and even Knights Of The Old Republic as landmarks along this journey. But Starfield also resonates with that visual style, for it triggers our own nostalgia for the gleaming white functionalities of the Space Shuttle interior, of Vostok, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab12 and Mir, the ISS, those hollow promises of a future where space travel is as trivial as taking an airliner to another continent. Unconsciously, Starfield plucks that string with some vigour and if you can find some harmony in its music, complete rapture is absolutely the correct state to find yourself in.
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This is a lie. See later for details!
Bethesda Game Studios Open World Role Playing Game.
The first best thing I can imagine is a BGSOWR set in London in the 1980s. Transpose everything in Skyrim into Thatcherite London. Just. Fucking. Imagine. It.
There has rarely been an oh-so-witty observation more overused by unimaginative assholes than 'the breadth of an ocean but the depth of a puddle'. Well fuck you because that fucking puddle is so fucking awesome I will drink it till it’s fucking dry and fucking love every fucking second of it. I’ll fucking chew on the mud at the bottom, motherfucker.
Somewhat sledgehammered with Starfield's Neon, a hub seemingly dedicated to cyberpunk tropes, as well as Cyberpunk ones that feel too keenly aligned to be coincidental evidence of a shared Narrow Reference Base.
We are not going to 'Nasapunk' this as there is no fucking punk in it. GROW UP.
Bethesda Game Studios presents: Solitaire, the card-based open world RPG. Pick your suite, work up through the ranks to royalty, Uncover the conspiracy of the haves and their draw-one rules, while the hoi-polloi have to make do with draw-three.
I adored No Man's Sky, even in its launch form, but it laid too heavily in a facile evocation of 70s scifi art and its focus on the planetary for it to really shine as a game, not to mention its conceptual inconsistencies. I think it's an extraordinarily precious piece of work, particularly for Gen-X scifi heads, being so full of love for turning flimsy childhood dreams into a real thing to play. If I end up with dementia, I hope I'll be plonked in front of No Man's Sky and allowed to fly across a billion fractal landscapes until I can't pilot the ship. After that, YouTube will do fine. Or just a slideshow of Foss and Elson.
Or IMMERSIVE SIM if you really fucking must.
I have, so far, resisted exploring the Solar System in Starfield, even though I know I must. It dredges up fond memories of doing the same in Elite 2: Frontier, particularly parking myself on Mimas and watching Saturn rise and fall in the sky, marvelling at the planetary dynamics at play as being just a background part of a game. We have truly been spoiled for decades.
There is a vague cultural supremacist undercurrent in Starfield’s worship of the specifically-named NASA aesthetic. You can never underestimate a nation’s capacity for patriotic celebration.