Spoiler free until it’s made clear where the spoilers begin.

If you know the nerdy side of me, you would be acutely aware that I was a Skyrim fanboy. I bought it on every platform I owned. If I had a Tesla, I’d definitely own it there too. Any of you who read this blog before will know I am also a star wars kid. So its a reasonable assumption to make that smashing those two worlds together in the latest game from Bethesda Game Studio’s (the guys who brought us Skyrim) would be a guaranteed smash hit for me.

Well last year when I played it for the first 5 or so hours, I would have told you that it was exactly that. I was ready to make a character and get stuck into the world they’d built, and discover the stories they’d left to be found. And so I did just that. I built ships, I became a smuggler, and I became a vigilante. I ended up doing a bunch of quests in Neon, the games version of a Cyberpunk dystopia, which is where I started to notice something about it. 

Bethesda Game Studio’s broke the industry with Skyrim in 2011. It became the go to game to compare all RPG’s to, and rightfully so. It remained the benchmark for 4 years in 2015, when The Witcher 3 came out and took things to a new level. Later that same year, Bethesda came swinging back with Fallout 4. While it was well received and is a very good game, it didn’t dislodge The Witcher 3 as the new benchmark. 

This context is important, because the next single player game that Bethesda Game Studio’s put out is Starfield in 2023. Thats a very long gap, even in game development parlance. It meant it came out in a world where the standard for these immersive role playing games has gone to a different place. 

Assassins Creed games have become fascinating open world historical sims, letting you become a Viking or a Greek warrior. Playstation released two games in the Horizon franchise, the latest being Forbidden West, one of the most visually stunning games and with combat that is as fun as it is variable. Then there’s the new standard bearer for me, a game which has replaced Skyrim as my favourite game of all time: Cyberpunk 2077. Walking around in Starfield’s Neon city, it hit me how old this game felt. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is another topic altogether, one I will go into at some point. But the gist of it is that it is a world that feels real, and contains characters you actively care about and find yourself checking on between completing missions. It’s got gameplay is fast paced, varies depending on your style. It gives you choices through every part of it that influence the game and the people in it. 

Starfield’s biggest fault is that it’s a game that’s 8 years late. The engine is functional, but not impressive anymore. The gameplay is fine, but nothing that gets you particularly excited. The flying and the movement are updated from Fallout 4, but they’re duds compared to its generational competition. The characters are interesting at best, and frankly annoying at their worst. 

I know this all sounds negative, but that’s kind of the weirdest thing about Starfield. It’s not bad, it’s just old. It does everything a Bethesda Game should do, and it does it really well, but those things aren’t enough now to make it the “can’t stop playing” game of the moment. 

So, how would it compare to it’s 2015 competition? Well actually quite well in all the technical aspects. It’s better looking than them all, it runs smoother than any Bethesda game ever has on launch, and it’s got some new systems like Ship building that add something different to the mix. Here’s the twist though, the game’s main quest makes the rest of the things you can do in Starfield irrelevant. 

Spoilers from here

The main quests of Skyrim and Fallout 4 are great, but they’re their own thing. They can act as motivation for your character to progress to certain areas, but nothing you do in the mainline quests affects the rest of the game. In Starfield, someone forgot about this crucial element. 

So here is the spoiler for the game, this is the end of the main quest: 

I’m giving you a final chance….

I’ve realised in the last few years that the way I play these games is very much as a role player. I make up a character with a backstory, and I play out the game making decisions based on that characters life and the “Head-canon” I’ve come up with to inform them. So I played the game with that in mind, they are that person with that primary motivation. 

At the end of the main quest in Starfield, the game resets as you’re sent to another “Dimension” to start your journey as a “Starborn” all over again. It’s a genuinely great idea for a game mechanic that adds replayability to a video game. Narratively, it’s a really great story move and for the Starborn character you’re playing it makes total sense. Only the guy I made wasn’t meant to be this starborn dude. He was just a smuggler, or a soldier, or a pirate. 

The issue is that Starfield is a role playing game. The core crux of these games is “Play it how you want to, be who you want to be in this world”. Well if you’re telling me I’m the starborn, nothing else in the game really matters. To drive the point home that it’s the only important thing, the game takes away all of your money, your ships, your farms, your house, and your inventory. Narratively, the characters motivation is entirely to pursue the starborn life. Knowing you can skip off to another galaxy at any point really takes away from the value in “living in the world”. In fact it’s not just the option, its actively encouraged by the game. 

I know you can play the game and just ignore the main quest. Get off the first planet, and you can go wherever you wish. It’s a bizarre choice, and one I can’t understand from a game design standpoint. You’re making a role playing game. Making a bethesda RPG that includes this strange “Reset the world” mechanic stinks to me of a developer misunderstanding it’s audience. Whenever I want to reset the world in Skyrim or Fallout, it’s because I want to start a new life as a new character.

This mechanic can work so well in the right place. In my opinion the best gameplay in history is in a game called Hades, and that whole game is centred around finishing the game, having everything taken from you, and then doing it all again. I have run through it maybe 100 times, because the motivation to do so is so good, and it’s integral to the games design.  What’s perhaps most telling is that I have only finished the main quest once in Starfield.

When I returned to the game when they put a big update out, I didn’t continue the game. I treated it like Skyrim or Fallout, and made a second character with new motivations, who will never care about the main questline in this game. It was a much better experience, playing as a pirate and performing a heist, growing my collection of ships via illegal means and being a badass pilot is rewarding as all hell.

I spent hours figuring out how to make “adhesive” and the satisfaction of finally building a farm that made more than i’ll ever need was immense. That is the kind of strange, unique and un-guided stories you find in these games that make them so special. They’re the things you take to your friends and when they say “Ugh i could never get enough adhesive for the weapon making stuff” you are right there with the solution. Alright thats a very specific example, but it’s not impossible someone who played this game doesn’t even realise you can farm adhesive.

Starfield is a game out of time, but it has all the elements I love about Bethesda’s previous titles. So the question remains; Why did they feel the need to make all these great moments irrelevant with a main quest that strips you of all your acheivements? 

Verdict

All in all, Starfield would be a fantastic game in 2016, with a flawed main quest. In 2023, it’s a throwback to a generation of RPG’s we’ve mostly grown beyond as a gaming audience. I truly hope the Skyrim sequel that’s in the works learns the lessons of this game, and we see a new RPG benchmark from Bethesda. No pressure Todd. 

Let me know your thoughts in the comments, or on one of the many social media’s. Til next time, thanks for reading.

Written by ChAzJS