Starfield

OTHER

CHARACTER GENERATION

It’s alright. You can choose pronouns, which makes small-minded people very angry. Big fan. Body types are delineated by arbitrarily assigned numbers rather than sex, which. Okay. I guess. S’pose you want to be inclusive. There’s some neat traits. Could do with a few more.

GRIPES

• You can find M1911s, AK-47s, and other similarly aged firearms. They work just as well as modern firearms, despite being seemingly unmodified from their original designs. This does not work, because space guns need special designs so they don’t overheat and melt.
  • You can also find a Mercury-era space suit, that functions similarly well as a space suit.
• The game is 116 fucking gigabytes.
• Like most other Bethesda games, the game has not come out with full mod support, instead scheduled for Q1 2024. It’s a triple-A title, dunno why they can’t just give us the modding tools straight-up.
• They included the Annoying Fan, for some goddamn reason.
• Space suit environmental protection runs out? And lets gas in? Even in a vacuum? I could maybe understand that in a corrosive or radioactive environment, but toxic gas? I thought space suits were hermetically sealed. To, you know, protect from hard vacuum.
• New Atlantis has a stupid name.
• There are more than a few places where your companion is allowed to just hang out – including a restricted UC research facility. If there weren’t parts of the game where they weren’t allowed to be, this wouldn’t be anywhere near as bothersome.

THINGS I LIKED

• There are actually a few locations where the presence of your companion is acknowledged, and they are not actually allowed to be!
  • In a similar vein, companions are actually allowed to speak to people in conversations, sometimes altering the course of the conversation, albeit slightly! There are even places where you can just let your companion do the talking, which is really great.
• NG+ includes several points where you can use your foreknowledge of plot events to get altered dialogue, sometimes skipping parts of quests entirely.
• NG+ gets… weird at points (warning, spoilers and/or confusion past that link!). Delightfully weird.
  • I work alone.
    • Yes, we know…
• One of the guns looks like a P90!
  • That gun’s big brother has the same top-loading thing but you can also put a scope on it, so when you need to reload it, the scope slides back, which lets you at the magazine. It’s a dumb design but I kind of love it.
  • Another gun-related note: basically every last modern gun has an ammo counter on it. Most of these are not in places with obvious screens. Science!
• Soundtrack was decent.
• You can have parents! You can have loving, doting space parents! Very few games let you have family, especially family voiced by Tuvok and Kira Nerys.

DEE’S THOUGHTS

I don’t recommend this game at full price, or anywere near full price. Get it if it’s 50% off, at the absolute least. And definitely do not get it until mod support is up, and there’s a good variety of mods out there.

It’s a vapid experience, full of potential that is never once realised. The background is never examined ever; the best questline in the game makes no goddamn sense if you think about it for a few seconds; some of the lore doesn’t make any goddamn sense if you think about it… the gunplay is alright. The building needs a lot of work before I can call it remotely fun. Mod support still hasn’t been given to us on release! There are four companions, all of which have almost exactly the same moral compass; so many balance decisions are just not good… it’s a Bethesda game, in short.

And yet, I can’t put it down. Points for that, I suppose. Christ, that’s NZ$150 I’m never getting back. Mid out of ten.

I’m going to pre-empt a response that some of you will doubtlessly be making: “I still enjoy it!” That’s good. That’s great! I’m sincerely glad you do. Somehow, I also enjoy it. But does that make it any less valid to talk about the game’s flaws? The game’s many, numerous flaws? I will admit that much of my critique is destructive, but identifying a work’s problems is still the first step to solving those problems. I just have significant doubts that Bethesda cares enough to offer solutions. Making a mid game great isn’t exactly a good use of money, after all! Not when modders will likely fix every last bug and bad design decision for free. I would say that we need to hold them accountable, but let’s be real, they operate under a capitalist framework. More money gooder.