Looking back, it was impossible for Starfield to live up to the hype. Twenty years in the Making! A Thousand Worlds to Explore! Massive Cities! Build your own Outposts! Build your own SHIPS! And it looked amazing. Screen shots of ringed planets filling the sky, space battles in asteroid fields, and characters that appeared to have-character.
Turns out you can’t actually land on all the planets, such as gas giants and the like. The ones you can land on are, well, pretty empty. And the Points of Interest are procedurally generated. Meaning you can find the same Abandoned Listening Post countless times while exploring. I read somewhere there are a hundred of these random POIs, but I don’t feel like I’ve hit anywhere near a hundred different locations. Mainly the same twenty or so keep popping up with a handful of rarer and more interesting places sprinkled in now and then. But even the places that were amazing the first time are less amazing every time you visit them again.
It’s common now to have people say things like “I played this game for two hundred hours and now I hate it.” Starfield is far from perfect, but it is pretty much what I expected—Fallout in Space. You have a godlike character with a set of slightly annoying companions and often brain dead enemies. I can’t even count how many times I have cleared a base only to find one last Pirate kicked back in a chair twiddling their thumbs. If you go ahead and kill this hapless enemy, it gets marked down in your stats as a murder, you’re supposed to wait for them to get hostile and then shoot them. Sigh.
The writing is bad to very bad in a number of spots. The main quest is pretty terrible. And yet, I still find myself playing it. You don’t have to do the main quest. You don’t have to build outposts. You don’t have to build ships or guns or spacesuits. You can visit all the random little planets and kill all the bad guys you find and sell all their stuff. You can, if you want, get married and settle down in one of the many, many houses you can buy or earn all over the Settled Systems.
I was going to complain about the lack of options, the lack of consequences, and the failure after twenty years to flesh out so many of the stories that feel half-baked and ultimately pointless. But I really do love Starfield and all the things that everyone is griping about don’t matter that much to me. So what if loading screens are a core component of Starfield? It’s a fun game. Sure, it’s not as good as Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3, but damnit, very few games are.
