Starfield was the first major game produced by Bethesda since Microsoft acquired it’s parent company ZeniMax Media in 2021, it was also their first new IP in 25 years and their first major release since the dumpster fire that was Fallout 76 in 2018. It’s fair to say that there was a not insubstantial amount of pressure on Starfield to produce the goods and to do so to a level that would entice players to shell out the money for an Xbox Series X/S and along with that Xbox Games Pass onto which Starfield released. So did it deliver? I’ve managed to clock up almost 100 hours on the game and I’m still unsure. For me what it did do though was unintentionally shine a light on all the blemishes that Bethesda are usually able to conceal beneath the cloak of their greatest strengths.

Bethesda’s greatest strength has always been it’s world building and the lore of the universes it creates. So surely space and it’s infinite possibilities is the perfect setting for one of their games? No, I think this was a frontier better left unexplored for the Maryland based developer. It is the infinite nature of space that makes it such a difficult setting for video game developers to really stamp their own mark on. “World Building ” is a phrase that necessitates the defining of limits – between these limits is the World and all the weird and wonderful things that happen there. Space as a setting deprives you of that when you set your scope as wide as Starfield did; boasting upwards of 1000 explorable worlds. This does of course give you the opportunity to have lots of different worlds each with their own unique culture, history and biomes but it would be ludicrous to expect any developer to be able to create 100 fully realised worlds with unique cultures and stories let alone 1000. Instead what we get in Starfield is 1000 characterless, largely unpopulated, procedurally generated rocks. So by the nature of space as a setting and the scope of the game Bethesda made it almost impossible for themselves to really harness their greatest asset as a developer.

Of course setting is just one aspect of world building and there are other ways to convey your artistic view of a universe other than the physical space. The other major way is to convey a world through the player’s interactions with its most prominent characters and factions. This is something that the Mass Effect series does extremely well. In the first game the scope is reasonably wide but with just a handful of explorable worlds and as the series progresses the scope is reduced and developers Bioware rely on the game’s colourful cast of characters to portray the intricately weaved tapestry of the late 22nd century universe to the player. This is for me where Bethesda fails massively with Starfield. Whilst officially there are 26 possible followers in Starfield, only 4 of them actually have personal storylines and character progression, the remaining 22 all being plug in, plug out guns for hire or crew for your ship. And here’s the kicker – not a single one of the main 4 followers is even remotely interesting. They all belong to the same faction and have similar motivations and morals, blending together like some hideous beige Cronenberg monster. Even after tens of hours journeying with each of them and completing their personal quests I still hadn’t particularly warmed to any of them, and [SPOILERS] when one of them bit the dust later in the game I felt absolutely nothing. This made me think back to previous Bethesda games and the cast of characters that belonged to each and the more I thought about it I realised that Bethesda have never really been good at writing individual characters. There wasn’t a single character from previous games I felt strongly enough about to have cared if they too had bit the dust (maybe Nick Valentine at a push).

As for the factions, they all seemed to exist completely independent of each other, there was no dramatic vying for power like in Fallout 3 and 4 but rather just a string of self contained hit jobs and fetch quests against the so called mutually agreed upon ‘bad guys’ Even the 2 major factions which are supposedly so wildly culturally different and hateful of each other seemed barely different to one another except one of them wore cowboy hats and said the word “freedom” alot. 

I understand their decision to focus heavily on the exploration aspect of Starfield, after all, their other series succeeded in large part because players enjoyed the freedom of exploring The Wasteland or The Continent of Tamriel. But both the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series’ focus on smaller areas within the wider world, shifting focus to other areas with each instalment.  In my opinion this is what Starfield should’ve done, maybe setting this original instalment exclusively in Freestar Collective space, then moving around to different factions’ areas of space in future instalments, allowing for the more intricate storytelling devices that are so very important when trying to establish a new universe. 

I’m tired of hearing developers pull out the classic  ‘we wanted the game to be less restrictive so that the player can make their own fun and adventure’, when being criticised for a lack of storytelling in their open-world RPGs. Making fun and adventure is what I’m paying you for! Just because I want to ride the rollercoaster that you’ve built doesn’t mean i want to be responsible for steering the bloody thing.