There are two questions swirling about in my head, and I am unsure which will lead me to the answers that I seek: "how did this get made?" or "why did this get made?" It's an issue of intention, stemming from the same source of bewilderment: Starfield. As Bethesda's next big premier franchise, it was easy to get drawn into its grandiose mystique, wondering what they've learned from working on Elder Scrolls and Fallout. I stayed away from any prerelease coverage once I knew it would be coming to Game Pass, allowing me to dive in head-first, ready to explore its boundless universe.
I emerge out the other side confused and wildly irritated. Why is Starfield the way that it is? The question jut out at me again and again, like a turgid hangnail I could never clip. The game raises too many red flags for a seasoned developer, especially one with a devoted fanbase eager to show them where and how to make improvements. It stands to reason then that this is all by design, Bethesda intending for the game's foibles to come off better than they do. But the sheer clunkiness of Starfield's systems and its puddle-deep universe reek of something worse than simple scope creep or design oversight—it's a fundamentally slipshod experience that relies on you being too dumb to put it down.
Note that this isn't to say Starfield is devoid of merits. There's a lot to like here: the setting is well-fleshed out, the alien design is beautifully weird, the gunplay is leagues better than Fallout 4 (which was leagues better than Fallout 3), and Constellation feels like a proper family by the end of your journey. Your companions start off somewhat uninspired but grow considerably more interesting during your travels, and I like the motivation behind the enigmatic Starborn. On the surface, Starfield is both competent and confident, able to justify the hundreds of hours its fans will inevitably pour into it. But if you so much as scratch Starfield's pristine shell, you'll uncover the ashen remains of Bethesda games of old.
Skyrim's horrid inventory system makes its ugly return here, offering few ways to customize or manually sort through hundreds of items—and no way to mark anything as a ware to sell later. Important quest items and lore get piled into your "misc" tab, which is also where all of the game's junk gets shoveled into. There's no visual preview for any of the items in your inventory either, forcing you to manually flick through them one by one if you're looking for a specific weapon or ammo casing that you forgot the name of. Likewise, containers you loot out in the wild like locked chests and dead bodies only reveal the names of their contents, requiring a load to your inventory to glance at their sell value or individual statistics. I can't think of a single person that thought Skyrim's inventory system was flawless, which is why it's so baffling to me that it's been preserved here like a precious amber insect over ten years later.
The inventory system is its own can of worms, but I also have a special hatred in my heart for Starfield's physical marketplace—or lack thereof. For the first 20 hours I had no idea how to navigate it, burdened with questions the game had no care to answer. Where is the best place to buy ship parts? Digipicks? Offload contraband? Where are all the stores on New Atlantis? Are there merchants that can mod my weapons? Why can't I upgrade my reactor's capacity? Why don't any of these cities have any goddamn maps?! For far too long I'd wander around like a sleepless drunk, trying to remember what shops such as Outland, Whetstone, and Enhance sell (did you know one of them is an eatery?), with my stamina depleting every few steps thanks to the game's appallingly low carry capacity. And even when I did find the seller I was looking for, more than once I wound up buying some of their useless stock because your inventory screen and their inventory screen look the exact same.
The more of it I played, the more Starfield's atrocious inventory got on my nerves. Why can't the items you purchase get transferred directly to your ship? Why do I have to manually lug ship parts back to my vessel's miniscule vault? And why aren't direct heals (ie ship parts and med packs—the most used items in the game) given their own tab, instead of being lumped in amongst a bunch of useless food stuffs and situational drugs? Why do I have to remember the ammo types of my weapons when purchasing ammunition, instead of the game simply telling me I have a weapon that uses the ammo I'm looking at? Why are weapons denoted by color rarity when their preceding adjective (calibrated, refined, advanced, etc) is far more indicative of their value? Why isn't there an option to turn off contextual pick-ups for items (like staplers and beakers) that are worth less than ten credits? And why in god's name do you not auto-dump all of your heavy metal minerals onto you ship when you board it?! Who in their right mind wants to walk around with chunks of titanium and lead in their pockets, dragging down their pants until their pasty-white dumb ass is exposed?
The underlying issue this all points toward is that no matter how fun Starfield might look to play, it's a royal pain to navigate. And nowhere is this point more aggressively obvious than in its spacefaring, a veritable black hole dense enough that you can't grav jump away from it. Your spaceship, for as cool and customizable as it may be, is a glorified loading screen for 90% of the game. And this is in addition to the game's other unavoidable loading screens which bookend it! So you'll load to get into your ship, use your ship to click on your destination, and then load again to arrive. As if that wasn't enough, these bits are also bookended by unskippable animations, forming a sandwich so thick with loading that only the grotesque hoagie from Sonic '06 can rival it. This is no exaggeration—Starfield avoids taking the crown of inactivity solely because it loads faster than Sonic '06, not less.
This issue only gets compounded when you're trying to venture out to far-off solar systems, as you have to manually jump to every unexplored system on the way. At the start of the game this isn't a problem as exploring is still a novel idea; every moon could hide secret, every outpost a valuable quest to stumble upon. But there is nothing of value in Starfield's procedurally generated galaxy—just the same abandoned outposts, abandoned mines, and boring laboratories. Each rendition has only a few variations too, with the abandoned mine being the worst offender that you'll have to venture through it multiple times even within the main storyline. Eventually you'll learn to skip every celestial body you come upon, sticking to your terribly-organized quest log—and thus rendering every unexplored solar system between you and your objective another unnecessary loading screen to suffer through.
Occasionally space combat breaks out to remind you to stay awake, but it's a strongly love-it-or-hate-it affair. I commend Bethesda for doing a decent job in handling how it plays and giving you full control over your ship's systems (even if it's impossible to manage in the midst of combat), but the problem is that space combat is significantly more volatile than regular-ol' ground-based shootouts. Better weapons, engines, and ships are harder to come by due to their hefty price tags, and one enemy on your tail is harder to shake than an army of mercs bumbling about a space station. Not only is it impossible to tell what kind of weapons your enemy might have on them, but it's also difficult to discern what in your arsenal is effective due to how infrequent the dogfights are. Plus when you're outmatched in a gunfight on land, you can often hide behind a nearby rock to swap equipment or pump your veins full of performance-enhancing drugs. Meanwhile in space, your tin can is going to get shredded time and time again, with no way to alter the outcome. It's strangely antithetical to Bethesda's playstyle, narrowing the solutions from "play smarter" the singlular, boring "get better gear, dummy." Well, that and "dump more points into the spacefaring skill tree."
Like with a lot of other systems in Starfield, the skill trees are one step forward, two steps back. On paper it works well: each tree type is well-organized and allows players to put up to four points into a single skill, provided they complete a number of fun sub-objectives throughout their travels. But in Bethesda's quest to make levelling-up as gratifying as possible, they've hamstrung the player's abilities, planting essential skills across the breadth of their tree. Things like being able to use your jetpack, pilot better ships, hack, see your stealth meter, parlay with NPCs, and carry more equipment are all relegated to skill tree upgrades, and you'll learn early on that level-ups are about as infrequent as the space battles. On the bright side this means there's always something on the horizon that you'll be anxious to pick up. Most of the time however, it makes the game feel frustrating and intentionally hobbled, requiring at least 10-20 levels to get properly settled (and even then, you'll wish you could dump even more points into carrying capacity).
For some folks, Starfield will scratch a special itch they can't get anywhere else—and look, I've been a fan of From Software since PS3's Demon's Souls, I get it. But like No Man's Sky years before it, you have to admit that the game is squandered potential made manifest. I went into Starfield without a chip on my shoulder but it beat me down with its draconic inventory system and fetish for loading screens. As a follow-up to Fallout 4 it feels shockingly unambitious; as a game from 2023 it is categorically outdated. Starfield's universe emulates—almost zealously—the very concept of outer space, filled with vast nothingness that's interspersed with boring, ubiquitous rocks. Sprinkled about are moments of that special Bethesda magic (Barrett is a real sweetheart), but like a total eclipse, its pros are overshadowed by the immense dullness of it all. There are thousands upon thousands of worse video games out there, but none of that changes the fact that Starfield was one of the most irritating games I've played this decade, if not my entire life.
