Review in progress: ‘Starfield’ takes the ‘Skyrim’ formula out into the … – GeekWire

(Starfield screenshot)

Ive spent roughly 20 hours on Starfield at the time of this review, which is nowhere near enough to feel like Ive 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 Bethesdas games is they technically do have endings, but in a real sense, theyre 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 isnt 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 youve 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.

Starfields 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 Im out exploring its vision of the universe. There are a few parts of the game that do feel like Bethesdas copying off its own worksheet, but when Starfields in a position to deliver on its core premise, its 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, youre some random blue-collar dope whos 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, youre offered a membership in Constellation, a small independent group thats out to reignite humanitys love of exploration. Youre given a ship, some crew, and a mission: help Constellation find the remaining pieces of the artifact.

Youre 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 Ive talked to has a job for me, whether its 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, doesnt have any systems like level scaling to keep you from blundering into parts of the universe you arent supposed to be in yet. Do yourself a favor: whenever youre in town, buy all of the medical supplies and Ship Parts you can find. You never know when Starfield will suddenly decide its time for you to get in over your head.)

At the same time, theres just enough detail in Starfields universe that Ive 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 smugglers 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 settings history.

Starfieldis a game where its themes and mechanics have been made to match. Its a massive, sprawling universe, andStarfields at its best when youre simply out on your own, doing your own thing, seeing what Bethesdas vision of space has to offer.

Its at its worst, however, when it actually does feel like its 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. Its 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 Im actually trying to do.

My other initial complaints mostly boiled down to being on the low end of Starfields 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.

Theres a lot riding on Starfield that has little to do with the game itself particularly its status as a legal football in Microsofts battle with the Federal Trade Commission. On June 30, court testimony revealed that in 2021 Microsoft bought ZeniMax Media, Bethesdas 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 jurys still out. Its up against some strong competition in the RPG space, between the recent Baldurs 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 its not even September. Starfields a good game and runs fine on Xbox Series X, but its 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. Its got the same sprawling, free-form depth as Bethesdas earlier RPGs, but puts it all together with unique visuals, an interesting new universe, and a lot of room to tell your characters unique story. Its worth checking out, as long as youve 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.]

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Review in progress: 'Starfield' takes the 'Skyrim' formula out into the ... - GeekWire