Let’s start by saying Starfield is a good game but a lot of that depends on your expectations. If you are expecting an open world full of exploration opportunities then you will be pleased. If your expectations are a deep storyline then you will be at least mildly satisfied as its story is neither cheesy nor cheap. Starfield also builds on what are now normal characteristics of an RPG including crafting, wide-ranging skill trees, FPS and space combat and companion tracing.
With all that going for it though, it suffers from taking itself too serious rather then letting loose of the scientific reins and allowing itself to just have fun. It almost feels like the developers were deathly afraid that traversing out of the range of complete realism would have been a travesty when in fact, fantasy in outer space has always yielded intense enjoyment sans Masters of Orion 2 or Alpha Centari (yes the protagonists in AC were human but were utterly diverse).
Bethesda brags that there are hundreds of planets to explore but who cares if 90% of them are boring? It is unfortunate that in this gigantic system of planets, all with their own set of environmental and geologic characteristics, provide not one species of sentient, intelligent life outside of human. Have we become so arrogant that we now believe only humans ever crawled out of the primordial ooze? It might be tolerable if those same humans had not utterly destroyed their own world.
It is also interesting that players are given the tools to build their own outposts and yet only six or so planets have created cities on habitable planets. No domed cities, no underground cities, only small mining colonies here and there that serve no real purpose other than being magnets for looting. To quote Jodie Foster in Contact, it seems like n incredible waste of space.
Don’t misunderstand, the outpost concept is a well thought out concept, perhaps too well thought out because I never quite felt like I had quite mastered the techniques for material transfer and an overt amount of time was spent transferring materials for building various components of the outposts, many of which just were not very interesting.
It isn’t that anything written about so far are bad things but rather it all feels a bit disjointed. Taking the skill trees for example; skills are segregated into five mjor categories, each containing many skills under each of them. Eventually it will be obvious that to perform certain functions such as space ship design crafting, outpost building or combat effectiveness, one must be willing to place skill points somewhere in that tree to finally unlock a chosen field. The product of this is that you’re limited and it takes careful planning to achieve the type of character you want to play.
After a hundred hours or so, Starfield is far from tedious but it is disappointing leading one to ponder that age old question, “Is this all there is?” and the answer being a resounding YES. It is at times feels like such a missed opportunity to have created something new on a grand scale. With the successes of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series, it is as though, Bethesda has shifted their concentration away from fun and into realism and it just comes off as rather souless.