Starfield is a single-player action role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and set in an open-world space environment. Players create a customizable character and explore a region of the Milky Way galaxy spanning approximately 50 light-years, landing on over 1,000 planets with procedurally generated landscapes. Gameplay includes first-person and third-person combat using firearms, explosives, and melee weapons, as well as spaceship construction, outpost building, resource gathering, and crafting. Players recruit companion characters, join factions, and progress through skill trees spanning Physical, Social, Combat, Science, and Tech categories.
If Starfield is to grow into something beyond an impressively sized canvas just waiting for you to roll your own space game by way of mods, it needs to have these foundational issues addressed.
In Starfield, many might see a time-tested, signature charm. Others might see a time-worn, laborious monotony. These are fair perspectives. A game this large is hard to distill into one set of strengths or one set of weaknesses. As in other Bethesda games before it, you’ll likely have to make your own fun here, but in giving us not just a swath of post-apocalyptic...
Starfield pairs near-impossible breadth with a classic Bethesda aptitude for systemic physics, magnetic sidequests, and weird vignettes. But in sacrificing direct exploration for the sake of sheer scale, there's nothing to bind it together.
Starfield is filled with possibilities for who you can become and what you can do, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in gaming.
A genuinely impressive space RPG that ultimately loses some of its Bethesda charm in the vast reaches of its galaxy. It's so big, it feels small, cold and unlived in.
