Game Review: Starfield
Written by Grady Fiorio Original Publishing Date: December 29th, 2023 Rating: 3/5
The Wizard of Todd: The Engine Behind the Curtain
Starfield
Developer Bethesda Playtime 52 Hrs Platform PC Release Date 2023
“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.” - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
I'm going to be real with you, I really struggled to write this review. I wrote, rewrote, and reorganized this review so many times. I broke down the gameplay, the factions, the story, and every element I could think of, in this absurdly large game. I had a nine-page review written, but after hours of combing through my thoughts, I realized it was all redundant… because Starfield is redundant. Starfield is not just a regression, but an active statement of Bethesda’s refusal to move forward. Starfield’s failure to launch is rooted in game design straight from 2007 and a level of complacency brought by Bethesda’s years of successes. I'd love to say that I’m surprised or that I’m disappointed, but to quote one Jules Winnfield “That shit ain’t the truth” Unfortunately, this is exactly what I expected. If Fallout 76 was any indicator of Bethesda’s trajectory, Starfield is the bullseye. In my struggle to write this review, I realized that many of my thoughts lined up with a majority of reviewer complaints and praises of the game. When writing a review/editorial, it’s important to me that I am adding something new to the conversation and not just regurgitating old thoughts. So in an effort to aid that mission, this will be more of a Starfield post-mortem, than it will be a review. So come along with me as we fast-travel among the stars.
The first new IP in over 25 years from famed RPG developer Bethesda (and the always charismatic game director Todd Howard), Starfield had many lofty ambitions to live up to. But with an outdated game engine, a lack of focus, and game design that's scattered between unconnected ecosystems, Bethesda shot for the stars and couldn’t even make it out of the atmosphere. It also doesn’t help that Starfield launched inbetween Bauldr’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk’s Phantom Liberty Expansion, two of the most well-received RPGs in recent history. It puts a spotlight on everything that Starfield gets wrong. While not a terrible game (and not nearly as messy as Fallout 76), Starfield’s failures come from a predictable decline in game ethos from the studio that once ruled the genre it pioneered.
One of Starfield’s many ties to NASA and real world science
Bethesda has been in a tricky spot for the last 8 years. While I enjoyed Fallout 4 quite a bit, I recognize that game is not without its flaws, and was a point of contention for RPG and Fallout fans alike. However, 2018 was a true turning point for the company, with the categorical mess that was the launch of Fallout 76, Bethesda’s first take at a multiplayer version of their games. This is when I realized that Bethesda was showing signs of a decline. Not only was that game a disaster, but Bethesda’s predatory business practices following the release made it clear that they needed a serious turnaround to find future success. If you can’t fail without grace, then chances are you’re going to fail once again. If Fallout 76 wasn’t going to be that wake-up call, then I don’t know what the hell would be. Things would all change after Zenimax, Bethesda’s parent company, was purchased by Microsoft in a $7.5 billion deal. Bethesda’s focus would shift from game sales to player subscriptions on Microsoft’s Gamepass service. Success was no longer tied to the dollar of sale, but rather the subsidy of inactive users. It’s a shift that the film industry made about 10 years ago, that we are now duly paying the price for, with gaming only now catching up. There’s not the same pressure for games to be great, they just need to hold subscriber retention. Starfield would now not only need to be a win for Bethesda but also for Microsoft’s new flagship business model, and fledging next generation of consoles. It puts Starfield in a new context that neither Bethesda nor consumers were ready for.
That brings us to today. What was once a marketing team’s dream of an immersive and endlessly explorable space RPG, was the reality of a series of menus, fetch quests, empty planets, and boring combat encounters that fail to deliver on many of Howard’s lofty promises. This brings up an essential question. Could Starfield issues have been fixed with just a little more time? No. At its core, Starfield’s ambition is let down by its outdated tech and uncoordinated game design. Most unfortunately, Starfield’s greatest flaw is a lack of soul. In all that great, beautiful, unbounded cosmos, Starfield lacks a compelling heart that gives players the drive to explore mankind’s greatest unknown. It wants to have a philosophical narrative, and a universe that can be endlessly explored, but the focus on the vast emptiness of space, and not its beauty, leaves players lost in a series of game mechanics that never cohesively tie together, or encourage players to experiment.
I’m a big fan of the robots that don’t try to kill you
Call it genius, or call it gimmicks, but Bethesda has found great success with the Elder Scrolls and Fallout due to their genius exploration, personality, and environmental storytelling. Even when combat fails, graphics are outdated, and glitches send your character spinning into the stratosphere, these two series have never failed to capture the imagination and gameplay hours of players worldwide. However, without these design philosophies, you’re left with only the hollow ends that make up Starfield’s core. Most players time will be spent in traversal or combat, the latter being one of Bethesda's biggest weak points. While shooting has greatly improved (no doubt in part due to their collaboration with id Software) it doesn’t have any interesting combat mechanics like V.A.T.S. or dragon shouts, to make fighting unique. About a third of the way into the main story, the game introduces starborn powers, a series of magic abilities granted by ancient ruins. However, these are almost completely useless outside of the infinite stamina power. Most of the time I completely forgot these even existed, especially when guns were significantly more effective than any of these powers. They’re not even fun to use, even if I wanted to give myself a combat disadvantage for roleplaying sake. To top this off, the enemy variety also lacks depth. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout are filled with so many monsters and creatures that require you to rethink how you approach new combat scenarios, but Starfield is almost entirely populated by humans, and a few aliens that offer nothing more than basic melee attacks. Combat encounters always begin and end the same way with very little variation in the middle. Combat boils down to a boring, albeit competent, series of firefights with the same rinse-and-repeat group of space pirates and four-legged aliens.
Starfield’s traversal system also leaves something to be desired. This is really disappointing as Bethesda usually nails down exploration. Because Starfield takes place across 1000 planets and lacks surface-to-space travel, as well as any land vehicles, traversal boils down to two categories. Fast travel menu systems, and walking in vast empty spaces while waiting for your stamina bar to recharge. While this isn’t entirely new for Bethesda games, the amount of empty procedurally generated content is. The amount of nothingness you have to wade through, only to find yourself at the same copy-and-paste cave or gang hideout, is frankly absurd. Leaving the beaten path and exploring (a Bethesda staple), is probably the worst thing you can do as a player in Starfield.
While Starfield starts promisingly enough, with an exciting shoot-out, a brand new spaceship, and a promise of multiversal plunder, as the game goes on it becomes clear that the reality shows a shallow ocean that rarely ever goes beyond ankle depth. It’s a frontloaded experience where the flaws become revealed with time. This can be clearly shown during the game’s initial launch reaction between players and press reviewers. Most outlets gave the game a score ranging in the 5-7/10 area, which new players found themselves baffled by. But if Steam reviews are anything to go off of, the “Mostly Negative” Steam review badge of honor Starfield has garnered, has proven that with time, player reception has matched with critics, and even surpassed their disappointment. Even Bethesda’s incredibly dedicated modding community has started to abandon the game a mere four months after its release. The Together Team, a fan developer devoted to a decade-long project bringing multiplayer to Skyrim, abandoned their Starfield multiplayer mod after concluding that Starfield is quote “fucking trash”. Their words, not mine. When your most dedicated fans abandon you, you know there’s trouble.
A whole lot of nothing
It doesn’t help that Starfield’s launch was met by an initial silence from Bethesda. The game launched in a poorly optimized state on PC, missing basic features such as brightness and FOV sliders, as well as Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology that has proven to greatly improve performance in nearly all games. To really rub salt in the wound. It took Bethesda three full months to add these features into the game when it only took modders TWO HOURS after release. Bethesda then spent these three months responding to Steam reviews trying to debate players on why the game was actually good and that the players were wrong. You have the right to defend your work after an 8-year development cycle, but it’s generally not a good idea to bluntly tell your customers “are game is good, you’re just not a good enough player to understand”.
When pressed in an interview Todd Howard was asked quite bluntly by Bloomberg Technology’s correspondent Ed Ludlow, “Why didn’t you optimize Starfield for PC?” After getting a great laugh from Xbox CEO Phil Spencer, Todd responded “We did. It’s running great. It’s a next-generation game... you might need to upgrade your PC” While this question (and many others asked during the interview) was a bit out of touch, the lack of basic features and optimization tech proved Todd’s statement not to be true. If anything, Starfield was optimized around 30fps both on consoles and PCs, which in 2023 is just unacceptable. Consoles have their limitations, but PC players who’ve spent $1000s on powerful rigs shouldn’t be held back by a $70 game, that lacks basic features that have been staples of PC games for well over a decade. Starfield definitely has some nice graphics, but in terms of complexity, it’s not doing anything that hasn’t been done in previous Bethesda titles that are over a decade old. While I don’t have frame time graphs of my own, my frame rate varied dramatically, dipping into the low 30s in the game’s largest cities and rising into the low 80s when in smaller interiors. Keep in mind that I played this game WITH the DLSS mod. I’ve included my PC specs at the bottom of the page.
The sad reality once again comes back to Bethesda’s aging Creation Engine, which has been powering their games since 2002’s Morrowind, under its original Gamebryo name. It’s come under scrutiny many times for its stiff and outdated tech. However, the Creation Engine has been an undeniable core pillar to Bethesda’s long-term success. The extent of the engine’s modability has allowed modders to run with Bethesda’s games, even creating completely standalone full game-sized mods, based on Bethesda’s original work. It’s not only impressive but a key reason that games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim are consistently topping concurrent player charts, over a decade years after release. That being said, Starfield has pushed the Creation Engine to its final limits. Starfield is constantly constricted by clear limitations on map size, NPC scripting, vehicles, and interactions between ground and space. While there’s no one significant negative, this death by a thousand papercuts kills immersion and constantly pulls you out of the experience that Bethesda is trying to create. In the ninth generation of gaming, Starfield feels like a relic of the past, sharing more in common with 2007’s Mass Effect, rather than modern RPGS like Bauldr’s Gate 3 and Final Fantasy 16. Starfield’s engine is a clear limiting factor in the gameplay and design philosophy, proving that the outer limits of the universe are just too much for it to handle. It’s time to put the little engine that could to bed.
A couple of potheads
With all of Starfield’s flaws stacking up, a lot of people will take this as an opportunity to shit on Bethesda, and more likely, Todd Howard. But the truth is that sometimes our favorite creators miss the mark. People are fallible, and even the best get lost along the way. Criticism is fair, but it’s not an excuse to harass and shame developers. Even with all the issues Starfield has, I do think that Todd Howard and Bethesda tried incredibly hard to make something special. No developer sets out to make a bad game, but sometimes it just happens. At the end of the day, I still gave Starfield a 3/5. It’s not an incredibly awful game, it’s just a low point from an otherwise outstanding developer. And hell, even when the game isn’t great, the Bethesda formula is still pretty addictive in its most bare form. I put 52 hours into the game. I don’t hate Starfield I just want something better from a team that I know can deliver it.
So what does this mean for the future of Bethesda, and more notably, Elder Scrolls VI? Well, if history tells us anything, I can’t say the future looks bright right now. But to say all hope is lost would discredit the work of hundreds of people exploring the great unknown of game design. Despite being out for almost 4 months, it feels like Starfield's story is only just beginning. Starting in February, Bethesda has publicly committed to releasing content updates every six weeks. This will include mod support, custom difficulties, new traversal options, and plenty more to be announced. Of course, the team is also working on the Shatterted Space expansion with hints at future expansions to come. Like Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield could have a rebound, but it’s up to Bethesda to see how these threads tie together in the end. In truth, only time will tell their fate. In the meantime, we gotta have a little bit of faith, cross the Unity, and hope that we end up in the universe where everything works out alright.
PC Specs
GPU: RTX 2070 8GB CPU: i7-9700k RAM: 64gb DDR4 Storage: 1tb NVME SSD
