I feel like I’m the kind of person Starfield was made for. I loved Bethesda’s last single-player RPG, Fallout 4 (maybe a bit too much), and there’s nothing I like more than a sci-fi universe with spaceships, lasers, and political intrigue flying every which way.
And yet, a dozen hours into Starfield, I was feeling lost in space. Things never went too far off course while I was flying my rinkydink little ship around chasing down mysterious artifacts and war criminals with a damn fine crew of companions at my side, but man did Starfield make me work hard to get through that opening stretch.
Even when it mostly righted the ship and I was loving the story, sidequests, and launching boarding parties on enemy ships, there were still too many problems that constantly popped up, forcing me to curb my excitement. It’s a bit like Starfield’s own elaborate shipbuilder tool: even though you can slap a bunch of high-end parts together and it will technically fly, sometimes it’s just not the best fit.
I would expect no less: Bethesda has built out a sprawling universe with detailed lore in which humanity has left Earth behind and colonized the galaxy, but hasn’t made first contact with sentient aliens as of the 24th century.
It’s chock-full of backstory about wars between its three major factions, run-ins with mysterious space deathclaws called terrormorphs, pirates, and an immense amount more. I wouldn’t call a lot of it especially distinctive – it’s a setting that’s reminiscent of The Expanse, Firefly, and Starship Troopers, full of references to every sci-fi movie from Aliens to Blade Runner, and of course Interstellar.
There’s even a fair bit of Indiana Jones influence as it sends you on a treasure hunt to collect mysterious artifacts. In fact, there’s a significant similarity to what Obsidian created for 2019’s The Outer Worlds. But it’s so densely packed in, with more stories around every corner, that I found it easy to get invested in it – once I learned the difference between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective.
Creating your character is a matter of picking a background story for them that comes with a set of skills and traits, as well as up to three modifiers. It’s always a bit tough to choose this on your first playthrough, since you don’t really know what you’re getting into and there’s no respecing allowed, but none of them is dramatic enough to really hinder you.
Some – like the one where your parents are alive and well (if you don’t pick this they just never come up), or the one where a crazed fan follows you around – sound like they’ll be fun to experiment with later, which adds a sense of replayability.
After that, while everyone starts out in the same mining camp and touches the same space magic that sets off a trippy 2001: A Space Odyssey-style vision, Starfield is an immense game that will send you off in all kinds of different directions once it hands you the keys to your first spaceship. It’s to the point where talking to others who played alongside me left us all bewildered and asking questions like:
“Wait, what do you mean you don’t know who the Vanguard are?”
“How did you not meet this person?”
“How are you crafting those weapon mods already?”
“Wow, you didn’t unlock [REDACTED] until level 20?”
“What the heck even is a Va’Ruun?”
“You met who in a bar?”
“Where did you find that ship?”
If you’re not sticking strictly to one questline and just take missions as they pop up (sometimes you get them simply by walking past NPCs as they chat), you can easily fall down all sorts of wormholes into extended chains of missions that take you on adventures that rival Skyrim’s in scope. Even after about 70 hours there are major questlines I haven’t even touched, and others I barely began. I’m eager to go back and finish a lot of those up now that I’ve completed the main story.
In typical Bethesda fashion, that main quest isn’t terribly flexible in how you resolve the situations it thrusts you into. Your options here are, for the most part, about picking whether you want to be a boy scout for whom a good deed is its own reward, a wise-cracking mercenary who asks to be rewarded after doing a good deed, or an all-business mercenary who demands to be paid up front to do the good deed.
There are a few choices you can make that affect who lives and who dies, and there’s a decision at the end about which philosophy to embrace heading into the final battle, but most of it is going to play out the same way because, no matter what, your goal is to solve the mystery of the artifacts alongside your secret society of explorers known as Constellation.
I won’t say much about where the plot goes because there’s a lot that can easily be spoiled, but I did enjoy the way it probes its biggest concepts – even those we’ve seen plenty of times before – in distinctive ways, and there’s plenty of well-written discussion about what it all means.
It’s in the side quests that you really get to act out your character’s morals: I happened across a dispute between a ship full of colonists and an obnoxious resort planet and had options that included peacefully resolving the conflict (which involves a clever technobabble puzzle) or stealthily sabotaging the ship and blowing up the colonists.
There’s a storyline that felt very Boys from Brazil-inspired, as well as numerous related quests about hunting down war criminals and banned technology that pose ethical quandaries to reconcile. You can join up with the Crimson Fleet pirates and dive into a life of smuggling and general space crime, or take up the mantle of a legendary pirate hunter.
There’s no shortage of interesting companion characters to hang out with throughout all of this either. I never felt like my Constellation teammates were wasting my time when they asked to chat, since they always had something to share about their background or a quest they wanted me to help them with.
There’s definitely a focus on Sarah, the virtuous leader of Constellation, and Sam, a former lawman with a young daughter in tow who he lives in fear of letting down. However, I was richly rewarded for taking the slightly more eccentric scientist Barrett along with me on some missions, and I suspect the others hold a few surprises up their sleeves as well – likely even the ones you hire out of bars when respectable folks like Sam bail on you for picking too many pockets or hijacking too many ships. But you can only take one person with you at a time, so I have more exploration to do here.
