I’ve spent roughly 20 hours on Starfield at the time of this review, which is nowhere near enough to feel like I’ve got a proper handle on it. With a lot of other games this year, reaching the 20-hour mark would put me at, past, or near their end, but Starfield is clearly just getting started.
Starfield is the most self-consciously big role-playing game yet from Bethesda Softworks, a Microsoft subsidiary and the Maryland-based studio behind similarly big RPGs such as Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 & 4.
The common thread between Bethesda’s games is they technically do have endings, but in a real sense, they’re only over when you decide to stop playing. In a Bethesda RPG, there will always be one more choice to make, faction to join (or betray), cave to explore, or monster to fight, and a single run isn’t enough to see everything it has to offer.
Starfield is deliberately cut from the same cloth, to the point where its own director has called the game “Skyrim in space.” If you’ve ever played an Elder Scrolls game or any of the last few Fallouts, Starfield will feel familiar from the moment you take control of your character. Ten minutes in, I was walking around a crowded locker room and realized there was nothing to stop me from filling my inventory with 120 pounds of soap and whiteboard markers. This is classic Bethesda loot gremlin behavior.
Starfield’s big addition to that formula comes from its sense of scale. It feels a little bigger every time I sit down to play it, particularly when I’m out exploring its vision of the universe. There are a few parts of the game that do feel like Bethesda’s copying off its own worksheet, but when Starfield’s in a position to deliver on its core premise, it’s a solidly addictive RPG.
Starfield is set in the 24th century, 100 years after humanity has abandoned an uninhabitable Earth. Humans live throughout the Settled Systems, a loose network of planetary nations, and have stopped exploring any farther into space than what they already control.
At the start of the game, you’re some random blue-collar dope who’s taken a mining job out on the edge of explored space. On your first day, you dig up a chunk of a mysterious artifact, which changes your life on the spot.
Soon, you’re offered a membership in Constellation, a small independent group that’s out to reignite humanity’s love of exploration. You’re given a ship, some crew, and a mission: help Constellation find the remaining pieces of the artifact.
You’re also entirely free to ignore that mission, however, in favor of doing whatever you want. For me that has included bounty hunting, debt collection, setting up remote mining outposts on unsettled planets, a little smuggling, some freelance security work, and a disturbing number of open gun battles with both space pirates and crooked mercenaries.
In my time with Starfield, it has seemed like everyone I’ve talked to has a job for me, whether it’s breaking into an impound yard or a hostage rescue. At one point, I was actually trying to pursue the main story missions, and I still ended up in a fight with a bunch of thugs who were looting a biotech laboratory. It had nothing to do with what I was on that planet to accomplish. It just sort of happened.
(Related pro-tip: Starfield, like Fallout, doesn’t have any systems like level scaling to keep you from blundering into parts of the universe you aren’t supposed to be in yet. Do yourself a favor: whenever you’re in town, buy all of the medical supplies and Ship Parts you can find. You never know when Starfield will suddenly decide it’s time for you to get in over your head.)
At the same time, there’s just enough detail in Starfield’s universe that I’ve often gone exploring just for the sake of learning more about it. Even the most barren moons in its universe often have a few mystery features, like an abandoned lab or smuggler’s cache, that reward you for taking a long stroll across the surface. Of my 20 hours in-game so far, at least one of them was spent just walking around the city of New Atlantis, listening to ambient conversations, finding new stores, and learning more details about the setting’s history.
Starfield is a game where its themes and mechanics have been made to match. It’s a massive, sprawling universe, and Starfield‘s at its best when you’re simply out on your own, doing your own thing, seeing what Bethesda’s vision of space has to offer.
It’s at its worst, however, when it actually does feel like it’s just Skyrim or Fallout in space. The ground combat in particular feels cut-and-pasted from any given Fallout game, with space pirates instead of Super Mutants and slightly different guns. It’s not bad, just sort of dull. Every time a gunfight starts in Starfield, I want to end it as fast as possible so I can get back to whatever I’m actually trying to do.
My other initial complaints mostly boiled down to being on the low end of Starfield’s learning curve. It throws a lot at you from the start — ground fighting, spaceflight, outpost construction, research projects, gastronomy — and I kept losing a few early fights before figuring out what I was doing wrong. Starship combat was a particular issue at first, but a few upgrades and a little practice eventually sorted that out.
There’s a lot riding on Starfield that has little to do with the game itself — particularly its status as a legal football in Microsoft’s battle with the Federal Trade Commission. On June 30, court testimony revealed that in 2021 Microsoft bought ZeniMax Media, Bethesda’s parent company, specifically to keep Sony, a prime competitor, from making Starfield a console-exclusive for the PlayStation 5.
As a result, Starfield is a hot topic in the ongoing social-media flame wars between PlayStation and Xbox fans, particularly since another major Xbox exclusive, Redfall, was a critical failure upon its May release.
Is Starfield the “killer app” that analysts argue the Xbox platform needs right now? The jury’s still out. It’s up against some strong competition in the RPG space, between the recent Baldur’s Gate 3, indie RPGs like Sea of Stars, and other big games from this summer such as Final Fantasy XVI.
This year has been an absolute murderers’ row for the gaming calendar, and it’s not even September. Starfield‘s a good game and runs fine on Xbox Series X, but it’s heading into a packed field.
What I can say is Starfield is better than I expected, after bouncing off a couple of Elder Scrolls games. It’s got the same sprawling, free-form depth as Bethesda’s earlier RPGs, but puts it all together with unique visuals, an interesting new universe, and a lot of room to tell your character’s unique story. It’s worth checking out, as long as you’ve got a couple of hundred hours to kill.
Starfield is out Sept. 6 for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and the Xbox Game Pass. Players who pre-ordered the game can start playing the full version on Sept. 1.
[Bethesda PR provided a digital code for the Xbox version of Starfield for the purposes of this article.]
