Starfield is a Remarkably Terrible Game

I didn't expect to like Starfield, but it's much worse than I ever could have imagined.

With my next book now available on Amazon, my plan upon Starfield's release was to sit down and play it non-stop all week, then write a mega-review as I had for Baldur's Gate 3 and Aliens: Dark Descent. It has been eight years since the last singleplayer Bethesda RPG; I haven't yet had the opportunity to review one of their games on this blog upon release, although I've written a decent bit about Fallout 3 and 4 over the years. I didn't want my first chance to go to waste.

I do not like Bethesda. Fallout 3 succeeds because the designers inherited Black Isle's Van Buren documents and shamelessly stole its ideas. Fallout 4 succeeds because it's a fun looter-shooter with a good world. Oblivion and Skyrim, though, are boring, poorly designed, buggy pieces of shit, with horrific writing and even worse gameplay. Skyrim in particular is one of my least favorite RPGs.

But despite their myriad flaws, The Elder Scrolls games do have some kind of charm. It lies mostly in their sense of atmosphere. For as much as I dislike TES, I can't hate it as a series. Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim have a litany of fundamental issues, but each is engrossing for at least a single playthrough of the main quest. The map is worth exploring. The sidequests are worth doing. They are games worth playing once, if not ever again thereafter.

That's why I had some modicum of excitement for Starfield. Indeed the vast improvements in production value and gameplay design reflected in Fallout 4 made me more optimistic than was warranted. There seemed to be a trend of Bethesda's games toward genuine AAA quality from Oblivion to Skyrim to FO4, as the studio moved away from cheap designer-written trash and toward something that actually reflects the quality of other games at a similar price tag.

Starfield is not that.

But I won't be reviewing Starfield, because after seven hours, I've given up. I hear it gets "really good" sixty or eighty hours in, but I'm convinced this is nothing but Stockholm syndrome. There is nothing to "get good" about this latest Bethesda atrocity. It is utterly without any recognizable merit whatsoever. Playing it gives me a headache; I cannot force myself to go on.

It seems worth putting forth the reasons why.

The Outer Worlds 2.0

The Outer Worlds came out the year before I launched this blog. I had so much to say about it at the time, but nowhere to put down my thoughts. I grew up as a devoted Troika and Black Isle fan; the promise of its team--and its premise--made it my most anticipated game of 2019. Over the years since I've often wondered if I should go back and review it, as it fits neatly into the pantheon of RPGs that I often discuss.

But I've never had the stomach. TOW is too earnest to honestly dislike, but it's a dreadful game. The narrative is repetitive, the shooting is poor, and there's no atmosphere. It feels like a Bethesda rip-off, with even lower production value. But my largest complaint at the time was that it had no soul. The world was a shallow attempt at mixing BioShock anti-capitalism, or at least anti-corporatism, with pulpy Flash Gordon-esq Fallout retrofuture. Without really understanding either aesthetic, Tim Cain & Co. made a game that felt like a rip-off of its own developers' previous titles. The attempts at personality and wit fell flat because the writers didn't know what they were trying to do. What do anti-corporate themes have to do with Flash Gordon retrofuture and pulp sci-fi action? How do they fit together?

They don't. The result was an RPG that has been almost entirely forgotten.

This might be a roundabout way of getting to my point, but I can think of no better way to illustrate what Starfield is like. Starfield is The Outer Worlds. If you have played the one, you have already played the other. They suffer from the exact same problems, in all of the same ways. The anti-corporate themes have been replaced with pretentious pseudo-spirituality, while the retrofuture aesthetic has been replaced with that of hard sci-fi, but they feel like the same games.

How does a hard sci-fi aesthetic fit into a game about killing thousands of people, zipping over the galaxy in a personal spaceship, becoming a space god, and instantly teleporting between distant star sectors?

About as well as Flash Gordon pulp fits with satire about megacorporations charging superfluous fees.

Starfield is the The Outer Worlds. Both share a lack of coherence and vision. Both are dull and stale. Both feel like lifeless rip-offs of themselves, and both are agonizing to play. But while I think The Outer Worlds was a bad game overall, I can say that it, at least, tried something. It may have ended up as a dull and incoherent Yojimbo simulator, but it did have an idea of what it wanted to do. It had some personality. It had a tinge of charm, even if that charm was mostly cringe-inducing and lame.

Starfield has no charm. Starfield is simply dreadful. It is as lifeless and confused as Joe Biden, with similarly few redeeming characteristics. Whatever advances were reflected in FO4 have been forgotten. The end result is an exercise in mediocrity, that is not even momentarily enjoyable to play.

Gamebryo? Gamebryno.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has no loading screens. When you encounter a cave in the wilderness, you can enter the cave without the cave needing to load. When you walk into a house, you do not need to wait ten minutes for the new environment to appear around you. And when you transition between states, you simply step over the state lines and find yourself somewhere new--you do not get taken out of the game.

Red Dead Redemption 2 came out five years ago. It is half a decade and a console generation old.

Starfield has loading screens every fifteen seconds. You must load to leave your ship. You must load to enter buildings. You must load to travel between star systems. You must load to land and you must load to take-off. If you discover a cave while exploring a planet, you will have to load before you can go inside.

In other words, despite having been advertised as a development upon No Man's Sky free-form interstellar exploration, Starfield is actually the same as every other Bethesda game.

Herein lies the root of all its problems. Starfield does not feel like its own game. It feels like a space travel mod for FO3, and I really do mean that in all respects. Encumbrance, randomly generated loot, clunky UIs, overreliance on maps and fast travel, and shoe-horned in skill systems--these don't belong in Starfield. They're not systems for the game Starfield is trying to be. They're the systems of a fantasy aRPG like Oblivion.

Why haven't they been changed? I honestly don't know. I guess because slop is good enough for Bethesda fans, and Todd didn't want to do the hard work of creating something new. But I still don't understand how this game took them so unbelievably long to develop, and at such tremendous costs, when it does absolutely nothing new.

Starfield is priced at $70, but it cannot compete with other, similar games--in any respect. It looks worse, runs worse, and has worse design than any AAA title I've ever reviewed for this blog. It does not feel like it should have come out this year. It would have been outdated in 2014.

That's really all I wanted to say. That's why I won't be finishing it, and that's why I won't be bothering to write a full review.

But Here Are a Few Examples of Why This Game Sucks Anyway

Since we're both here, though, let's point and laugh at a few of Starfield's many astonishing deficiencies.

This "dead rock" Sarah is referring to? Yeah, it's Mars. A major colonized planet. Five inches over that boulder is an entire space city. Good work Bethesda.

"Be anything," Todd said. "Go anywhere."

I decided to be a space pirate. I robbed a store.

The clerk was invulnerable. I shot her in the head; she got right back up.

Literally every single named NPC in Starfield is invulnerable. This sometimes has hilarious side-effects, such as a mission where you have to escort farmers in battle against space pirates: the farmers literally can't die, and so you literally can't lose. Just let them do all the fighting.

Why did they need me in the first place?

Here I met my parents. They were so poorly written that I decided to murder them. Unfortunately that is not allowed. Except they aren't even invulnerable. They are ghosts, phantoms, impossible to harm at all. My bullets phase straight through them.

Did anyone care? Was any effort at all put into this game?

Above you'll see the resurrected speech system from Oblivion. I tried to use sense to convince this woman into helping us, choosing the green option three times.

I failed all three times.

But I decided to reload, to try the red option instead. "Risk your life. It's going to be the adventure of a lifetime!"

*Sigh* is right.

Most children could write better dialogue than this.

Below we see one of the game's many planetary settlements. It is washed out and hideous and lacks any atmosphere whatsoever, just like the rest of the game.

Finally, here is a screenshot of one of the game's many odious crafting mechanics. The engaging gameplay: click on things until you have enough things, then make new things. Brilliant.

But it's the little touches that really make me dislike Starfield. Take, for example, how you move when on a planet with low gravity. You might notice something strange--the animations are exactly like they are anywhere else!

Neil Armstrong worked out that skipping was the best way to travel in low-g environments way back in 1969, but I guess Bethesda has yet to catch up.

Not Even a Looter-Shooter

A lot of critics online are complaining that Starfield is too much looter-shooter, too little RPG. This is true, but I can't criticize it for that alone: FO4 is also a looter-shooter non-RPG, and I've defended it on that basis before. It's my opinion that FO4 has good enough gameplay to make up for its horrible storytelling deficiencies.

Starfield doesn't. Not only does it have far greater storytelling deficiencies, but it also has far worse gameplay. Dozens of "critics" online have said, "Starfield has the best shooting of any Bethesda game yet!" but have provided no explanation of how this is true.

That would be because it isn't true. Starfield is a regression to Fallout 3. Its shooting sucks.

Do you remember fighting Synths in FO4? How their faces would fall off with each headshot? How their armor would disintegrate and get blown to bits with every bullet?

There is no locational damage on enemies in Starfield. Enemies have health bars, but their remaining HP is never indicated by their appearances.

Do you remember how awesome it was to hear the tinkling of bullets against your power armor in FO4? Do you remember how cool you felt, like a walking tank, when clearing out raider encampments?

There is nothing like that in Starfield. Armor is damage padding. Every suit is a spacesuit; there are no exoskeletons (as far as I can tell).

Do you remember how smooth the animations were for reloads in FO4? Do you remember how each gun moved in your hands like you were really holding it?

Starfield's aim-down-sight animations are like Fallout: New Vegas all over again. They feel cheap and ugly. Press RMB and the sights teleport in front of your eyes, snapping instantly into place. Weapon handling is repetitive. There is way too much reloading. Enemies are bullet sponges. And there are only fifteen or so guns in the entire fucking game.

If Starfield is a looter-shooter, it's the worst one on the market. You can't disarm enemies by shooting them in the hands. You can't trip them by shooting them in the legs. You can't blow off limbs and heads will never explode. Its only addition relative to FO4 is that you can lean around corners. Beyond that much, gameplay consists of nothing but standing next to generic spacer enemies, holding down the trigger, and pressing the stimpack button to stay alive.

That's all. There's nothing else. Starfield is a terrible FPS.

Starfield is the Worst Bethesda Game

I don't believe this game has any redeeming qualities. If you like the mindless exploration of space, play No Man's Sky. If you like shooting things with vaguely futuristic guns, play FO4. If you just want a repetitive RPG with a lot of stuff to do, any TES game is a better choice. And if you're desperate to play a space RPG, Mass Effect is always a good option. Mass Effect 1 and 2 do everything Starfield is trying to do, and they do it ten thousand times better.

Starfield is terrible. Starfield is The Outer Worlds, but with even worse storytelling. Don't buy this game. I deeply regret spending money on it.