Starfield is here, and after dozens of hours floating in space our reviewer Chris Livingston liked it—but didn’t love it. “Starfield is Bethesda’s biggest RPG ever, and it shares even more DNA with Skyrim and Fallout 4 than I expected—but it ultimately falls far short of the greatness of both of those games,” he wrote in his 75% Starfield review.
As one of the most anticipated games of the year, there are unsurprisingly already tons of Starfield reviews online from other publications that have been playing the game for the last week. Although there are some notable exceptions: Bethesda didn’t provide early review code to UK-based publications Eurogamer, The Guardian, and our sister magazine Edge until shortly before or just after today’s embargo. That means there are still more reviews to come—but with 97 reviews already collected on OpenCritic, there’s already a wide spread of reactions, from “this could be one of the most ambitious games ever made” to “a mile wide, but an inch deep.”
Here’s what the critics are saying.
The first few companions of Constellation I met were disappointing, too: a pleasant man, a pleasant woman, and another pleasant man. They were all extremely nice and agreeable, but that’s not really what I’m looking for in a follower. Where were the weirdos Bethesda is so good at creating? Where were Starfield’s versions of Nick Valentine, or Cicero, or Curie? Even Vasco the robot is kind of a bore—wait, didn’t Bethesda used to be great at making entertaining robots?
Actually, this was a complaint I had about Fallout 4 – that a large percentage of the NPCs seemed unhinged in one way or another. Nothing wrong with that to a limited degree, but Fallout 76 had more people who were just living their lives, and acted more like I’d expect ordinary people just put in difficult situations to act.
As the hours pass, travel starts to feel somehow both too fast (I clicked a location on the map and now I’m already standing on it?) and too slow (do I really have to watch the same docking cutscene every single time I visit a space station?).
I’ll give decent odds that they’re using that to cover up loading of the interior.
It’s a tough balance to strike, because while people who are just trying to live their lives are vastly more believable, they don’t really make for as interesting a story or character arc. A high concentration of weirdos might break your immersion, but many players will find the weirdos more memorable and be more invested. I remember Nick, Danse, Cait, etc a lot better than I remember… uh… Aela? Lydia? idk man.
By contrast, I’m loving BG3 because of the big plots driving each of the origin characters. Is it normal for such a high concentration of unique situations to be gathered by fate and happenstance? Absolutely not. But I enjoyed it a lot more than a party full of people who are just trying to get home to nice, peaceful lives and families and forget all this adventure nonsense as soon as the big bad is resolved.
That said, I haven’t bitten into Starfield yet, so I can’t comment on the balance they strike; I’m only commenting on your own impressions vs storytelling experience. If I’ve gotten something here wrong, please keep that in mind :)
I mean, Danse may be weird, but he’s not insane. I’m talking about characters who have a completely bizarre view of the world.
I’m talking about stuff like Codsworth retreating into his inner world at the start of the game, Pickman the serial killer and blood artist, Lorenzo Cabot being driven insane by the mysterious serum, Tinker Tom being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, Captain Ironsides trying to fight China with the USS Constitution, Kyle shooting his brother, the Mechanist, or Kent Connolly with the Silver Shroud obsession. The characters in Dunwich Borers. Hugo. Kasumi Nanako thinking that she’s a synth. Malcom the cannibal. Theodore Croup.
Fallout 1, say, had some pretty unusual characters, but it didn’t use insanity to the extent that Fallout 4 did.
I would argue Danse was pretty rabid about his purpose, which made the unraveling of his personal issue that much more delightful. Maybe not an unusual personality in the Brotherhood, but removed from that context, I thought he was one of the more fanatical characters we had.
And I get your meaning here, but I still contend I remember and can chat about all those folks you mentioned a lot better than the side cast of most games. Most characters are so normal I can’t even remember them to give you examples, and even if I could, they’d all be about the same kind of people anyway.
So I think it’s just a matter of different goals that appeal to different people. If the world is grand and immersive, you can get away with more normies. If the world is pretty standard, you need the characters to provide more excitement. I’m guessing Starfield has the benefit of a new setting, like early fallouts did, and doesn’t have to lean as hard on having an interesting population - but that’s bound to be a negative in some people’s books.
Honestly, a lot of the complaints are about what I would expect from a Bethesda title. The biggest surprise so far has been all the comments about how polished it is and the lack of bugs. Hopefully, that holds once more people get their hands on it and start really digging into it. It would be nice if Bethesda learned something from their last few releases. Then again it is a Bethesda game, so who knows.
how polished it is and the lack of bugs.
People are saying this about BG3 too, so I wouldn’t put much weight into that. The bar is apparently low these days to be considered bug free.
Well, not being able to travel through a system like in elite dangerous or other games, no man’s sky mentioned in the there (seemless transition between planet and space), is a bit disappointing.
The rest of the game seems a bit between mixed and great from the summaries in the article.
A more in detail look at each review would be needed to understand where the game lacks and where it would be good.
From the summary, for me, it would be likely that it could be interesting to try. But not for high expectation.
I get why people would think you’d be able to do seamless ground to space flight, but let’s face it: Bethesda is the company that even in their more recent games needed loading screens to enter large buildings. Contiguous flight was never going to happen.
Ehhh. I think it would be doable. I’m not saying that it would be worthwhile, but I don’t think that it would be technically not doable.
From an engine standpoint, they already had an open world for exteriors. Doing the same thing in 3d should be viable.
Separate interiors just lets you devote more memory to an interior because it doesn’t need to compete with the exterior. It’s an optimization, reduces resource consumption so that you can use that elsewhere.
People have gone back and modded Skyrim to make the closed cities open, and have kind of the same issue:
Open Cities Skyrim should not produce a significant change in your frame rates and performance. Due to the liberal use of occlusion planes in the mod, the game will not render anything on the opposite side of the city walls in any given location. So your viewing content will be limited to roughly what you’d see if you were in the closed city worldspaces. The closed city worldspace system was NOT devised by Bethesda to improve frame rates. It was devised to conserve system memory on the XBox 360 and PS3. You’re playing on a PC.
If you are either (a) willing to reduce interior complexity/quality or (b) aren’t resource-constrained because you’re willing to have fat system requirements, you can avoid loading interiors separately.
As to Bethesda’s ability to rip out the guts and change things…from a purely-technical standpoint, going from Fallout 4 – a single-player game on an engine with a lot of legacy weight – to Fallout 76 – a multiplayer game – was a pretty drastic technical change. I would not have wanted to be the one to do that. Decisions about single-player/multi-player permeate internals all over the place.
By comparison, what would they need to technically do to fly to a planet? Having support for some kind of better lazy loading/preloading stuff. I mean, a planet is gonna have to have a texture. Create a billboard for any structures you put on the surface, and then progressively load them as you zoom in. I dunno if the engine does dynamic level-of-detail stuff in the Z plane today (I think yes? When you’re on some of the elevated structures in Fallout 4, I think I recall models way down on the ground being lower-detail), but even if not, I doubt that adding that would be that hard.
I think that a better question would be…how much would it add? I mean, there’s an immersion factor, but is doing reentries honestly that much fun?
I’ve liked open-world space trading games, so I was pretty hopeful when I played Elite: Dangerous, but I wound up kind of disappointed. It’s pretty, and maybe if you have a VR rig, it’s a good example of something that can create an immersive experience around you. But a lot of elements of the game seem to be aimed more at creating a visual experience than there because they’re really great for gameplay. Which for me, at least, was neat at first from a novelty standpoint, but kinda didn’t buy me much in the long run.
I mean, I assume that most of the interesting stuff going on is probably gonna be on the ground. I guess you could create some kind of reentry game (flying around storms or something?) but I’m not sure how fantastic of a concept it’d be. My question would be more “what would it buy the player in terms of gameplay to have another few minutes spent doing reentry per planet?”
I’d be more interested in how the character/trait system compares to earlier Bethesda games, how the combat mechanics work, how the dialog with other characters works (a sore point for many in Fallout 4), the kinda meat-and-potatoes Bethesda stuff. Bethesda’s had configurable “houses” in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, and while I felt that there was potential there, I never really felt like the game really took advantage of it; I’m curious how the customizable spaceship plays into this. How well do the new procedural elements work with the static stuff? How readily-modded is the game?
