'Starfield' review: It has everything but a reason to keep playing | Mashable.
'Starfield' has everything you could want, except a reason to keep playing
After watching several loading screens, you can actually visit that planet in the sky. Credit: Xbox/Bethesda Game Studios |
Starfield is one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2023 for two good reasons: It’s by the folks who made Skyrim, and it promises a nearly limitless amount of exploration and exploitation throughout a fully navigable Milky Way galaxy. You can build your own spaceships, hire your own crew members, develop relationships with various companions, open outposts to extract resources from one of the game’s 1,000+ planets, and join one of several different factions.
It’s an impressive spacefaring adventure on paper, and in practice, everything works pretty much exactly as intended. But after 20 hours trying to find the excitement in Starfield, I’m not sure it actually exists. Starfield is a gigantic playground without slides or swingsets. There’s simultaneously way too much to see, and not much to see at all. Moreover, it almost totally fails to communicate how dangerous and wondrous space travel can be.
In other words, Starfield feels like a bullet point feature list given life, instead of something that is self-evidently enjoyable to play.
Why does outer space feel so small?
Despite everything I just said, I’ll admit that the opening hours of Starfield inspired a mix of awe and intimidation in me. It doesn’t take long before your protagonist is deemed a Very Special Person and given a spaceship, a crew, and a mandate to explore the galaxy searching for alien life. As Starfield slowly rolls out all of its systems, from a reasonably complex upgrade tree to a shipbuilding interface and outposts management, it feels impossibly huge.
And then you start to actually play it and the illusion shatters. Starfield famously has more than 1,000 planets to explore, but doing so rarely yields interesting results. A large majority of the planets and moons I saw in Starfield are barren rocks useful for little more than extracting resources. Stick around long enough and you may find a procedurally generated outpost with some space pirates to kill or a generic cave with some junk to plunder, but generally speaking, there’s just not much to see in most of Starfield’s playable spaces.
I see this as a consequence of Bethesda’s choice to go for a sort of NASA-punk aesthetic, one that favors something resembling scientific realism over the space magic of Mass Effect. It’s true that Earth being host to so much life (intelligent and otherwise) is a mathematical miracle, and indeed most other planets in the galaxy might be completely inhospitable to life. But that doesn’t actually make for a compelling game world.
What's worse is how Starfield betrays its own attempt at realism by making the player way too impervious to the very real dangers of space travel. Aside from bumping into the occasional nest of space scorpions or a toxic gas vent, there's very little danger to going anywhere. Planets with extreme weather like Mercury (800 degrees Fahrenheit during the day) are totally fine to walk around on because I guess your spacesuit is just that powerful. This makes every planet essentially feel the same from a gameplay perspective.
Starfield’s aesthetic bummers go beyond the art direction. I feel the need to point out that this game does not allow you to seamlessly fly your ship from a planet’s surface to space, or vice versa. Initiating takeoff and landing simply plays a small animation and then jumps to a loading screen.
I understand that taking a No Man’s Sky approach to space travel might’ve been a technical hurdle that Bethesda simply couldn’t get over and I respect that. However, the downside is that outer space actually feels kind of tiny when all interplanetary transit is done via fast travel. There’s no real way or reason to aimlessly fly your ship around, appreciating the grandiosity of space.
Instead, the ship only exists for dogfights that aren’t particularly fun, at least until you play for dozens of hours and get enough money for a badass ship.
A low hum of Content
Starfield finds its footing a little bit more in the spaces that were hand-crafted by developers, like major cities. From the shining metropolis of New Atlantis to the mean streets of the appropriately named Neon, Starfield’s big settlements at least have a lot to see and do in them.
Even that quality is relative, though. Questing in this game has the same rhythm as in previous BGS titles like Fallout 4 and Skyrim, which is to say you just run to the objective marker until you either have to shoot someone or talk to someone. Sometimes you can shoot someone to avoid talking to them, or talk to them to avoid shooting them. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.
That isn’t to say I haven’t had some fun with Starfield. One of the first things I did was break into an apartment in a seedy crime-soaked city, only to find a corpse that had been killed by a powerful robot dog named Big Bruno. Said robot dog proceeded to chase me through the streets for about 10 minutes until the city guards finally noticed and took it down for me.
That was the kind of emergent nonsense that these games are good for, but the bulk of my playtime was instead made up of unexciting questing with few peaks or valleys. It’s a low, droning hum of pure Content.
I’d be more fine with the traditional questing template if the writing were better. Alas, Starfield’s narrative side did little to impress me in the first 20 hours. The quest writing never really compelled me to finish things for the sake of seeing what happens, instead leaving me to finish things for the sake of getting some money and XP. And aside from a couple of standouts, like the wise-cracking early-game companion Barrett and a mysterious cloaked figure named The Hunter who hangs out in bars across the galaxy, most characters are fairly archetypical and uninteresting.
The troubling thing about trying to critically evaluate Starfield is that it’s exactly the game it wants to be. Everything works, in the sense that the game is surprisingly not very buggy and all of its systems are functional and easy enough to understand. Bethesda set out to make a gargantuan space quest and that’s exactly what Starfield is.
But what it totally lacks of any kind of propulsive quality, something that begs you to come back for more. Some games are designed around a central mechanic, something that’s fun to do for the sake of it. Starfield is not one of those games. No single feature, from the planetary exploration to the first-person shooter combat or ship dogfighting or role-playing or questing, stands out as exceptional.
I played 20 hours of Starfield and could probably play 20 more because I have the kind of brain that likes the feedback loop of completing quests and leveling up. But I can also get that from plenty of other games that have more going for them. In 2023, merely being Large isn’t enough of a selling point.
If you want to spend dozens or hundreds of hours searching for the fun in Starfield, be my guest. All I can say is that it never really made me feel anything.
Starfield launches on Sept. 6 on Xbox Series S and X consoles as well as PC. If you pre-ordered the premium or Constellation editions of the game, you can actually start playing on Sept. 1. Of course, if you have Xbox Game Pass, the game is essentially free, so you can give it a shot regardless of what I say about it.
Pro Tip: Don’t go to Mashable for gaming reviews.
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DeleteI watched a couple hours last night and it seems like it’s a fallout type game, huge exploration, sci fi themed. If you like the long game and nothing but exploring, missions and finding things like fallout series you’ll love this game
ReplyDeleteReviewer only played 20 hours. Sounds like way too little.
ReplyDeleteI mean, that’s twice as long as any reviewers gave Days Gone… 🤣
Deleteif it takes more than 20 hours to figure out whether the game is worth playing, it's not worth playing.
DeleteDon't get me wrong, I'm downloading the game as we speak, but "you didn't give it enough time" is just silly.
If the expected length of the main campaign is 40 hours, you should reasonably know if the game is worth it way before you play half of the "expected" runtime
DeleteI don't know about that..I'm 10 hours in and I haven't even finished exploring the first visit to New Atlantis. The game hasn't even put me through half the things you can do at this point.
DeleteI’m sorry but the gameplay looks so boring, dull characters and fluff … and I love Skyrim
ReplyDeleteit's not, just slightly different, my favorite parts so far are that the over encumbrance system doesn't effect your actual walking speed and you can even still run if you need to but trying to jog for too long like that will kill you, and the ship building mechanics. But in the end it plays more like fallout 4 but without vats
Deleteit's up to the player if they enjoy the game or not, everyone has their own likes/dislikes
ReplyDeletePeople want to hate on Bethesda so bad. It's like star wars fans.
ReplyDeletePre judgement.
ReplyDeleteNo Man's Sky docet.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there's any 'real reason' to play videogames.
ReplyDeleteentertainment is entirely a reason. And when a game loses that, then you have the problem.
DeleteWhen you need to pay for entertainment, it's usually not healthy. Videogames disconnect you from reality. If you make friends online, they're on the other side of the world. That's my view anyway.
Deletewe should not waste time on movies, books or, bear with me, making music either. They are merely unnecesary distractions. What’s the reason for doing anything beside eating, sleeping, pooping and making babies, right?
Deletemaking music and art is an expressive outlet to experience your own creativity.
Deletebut what’s the reason for expressing creativity? It does not lead to anything substantial, does it?
Delete>.> Nah. Teamwork and other aspects are also taught in gaming. Depends on the games you play. If you had a child.. you would probably screen some games.
DeleteI would even let a supposed child play Fortnite. But you know.. that the thought process of me.. ( *look left and right.* how does it deal with stress , loosing, winning and raging)
Theres informatione there. Depends on wether i can afford a garden and a house in the country.. >.>
If your argument is "disconnect from reality is bad" then I take it that you have never read a book or watched a movie or daydreamed in your life. What a sad existence...
DeleteAs for making friends from around the world, what's wrong with that? A friend that I met through a game that lives in Australia just sent me a care package full of cool Australian snacks to try. I gain such a broad global perspective from speaking with people all over the world.
there's also no "real reason" to create music or art, especially if nobody beyond your limited scope of close friends/acquantinces will appreciate it. The only reason things that "entertain" us exist is to waste time. We can't be productive 100% of our lives
DeleteWhen you need videogames to escape reality, then you have a problem.
Deleteperfect reason to do heroin.
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i didn't play enough of Starfield to write a full review, but i did play enough to know that i don't want to play any more
ReplyDeleteone weird thing i honestly forgot to mention (though i'm happy with the way the piece came out anyway) is how there aren't really distinct cultures around the galaxy. it feels like 1,000 planets that are all culturally North America
Deleteand to be clear i say this as someone who loved oblivion and fallout 3 and skyrim. i have nothing against those games even now. but i think starfield fully broke the spell for me. i don't know if i can do another one of these
DeleteSounds good, will create the reasons in my head
Delete1,000 planets < the directed and guided play experience of tetris: effect
Deleteseems like the logical endpoint of the kind of games they make. the giant, expansive open worlds were impressive in their time, but now that’s every game. and it sounds like they’re not really bringing a lot more than they have before to the gameplay, just more surface area
DeleteWait... I thought it wasn't launching until Sept 6 (which means it won't be playable until sometime in January)...
DeleteNot every game is made for you. Hard to believe, I know.
DeleteLol
Delete"It’s a low, droning hum of pure Content." 🖤🐈⬛✨
ReplyDeleteMaybe the reviewer should stick to platform games. Seriously, this is such a negative review for someone who doesn’t seem invested in spending time with the game beyond objectively viewing it for work.
ReplyDeleteMashable sounded like a good website until you found out it still exists for some reason 10 years later
ReplyDeleteShort form content has killed our attention span.
ReplyDelete…they also gave us F76 😏
ReplyDeleteBoring?
ReplyDelete