I’m a little bit of a fanboy for Bethesda games, ever since I first got hold of Morrowind back in 2003. It came as a freebie with some hardware my Dad bought as 2 CD-ROMS. This surely meant it was huge! I was going to have many hours of fun with this.
Kind of. 9-year-old me had absolutely no idea what he was doing in that game. I mostly ran around in my underpants in it and tried for hours to beat up the guards of Seyda Neen to take their gear. I’m quite sure that at one point I managed to get one stuck and pummelled the poor bastard with a dagger until he dropped dead. I took the jail sentence and then came back for his gear. Yay! Free armour!
I’ve been quite consistent with all of Bethesda’s games ever since. I played Oblivion for so many hours after school and became obsessed with modding it. I even dabbled in the creation kit myself and had a go of making my own dungeons. Now I think about it, if I’d just kept up that momentum, then I could have been one of the hot-shot modders in the modding scene. I got a good grasp of how it worked. My motivation plummeted on Skyrim’s release, though. I’d just turned 18 and was more interested in bumming around and playing the game instead of actually being creative. Fair enough, really.
This obsession carried on through the Fallout games too, and then in 2018 we finally got a very small glimpse of Bethesda’s brand-new IP. Starfield had a neat minimalist logo and promised to be huge. Everyone was beyond excited. The wait was unbearable, though. 2 years later, we were all locked up in our homes trying to avoid a nasty disease and crying at how shit Cyberpunk 2077 was on release. It wasn’t until 2023 that we actually got our hands on Starfield, after what felt like forever. It was the first single-player mainline Bethesda Game Studios game since Fallout 4, so all of us fanboys were hungry for it.
But… yeah. It was okay.
What Happened?!
I’m not here to fully slate this game. I sunk a good 100 hours into it in the first month of release, and I had my fill of fun. My first child was on the way at the time too, and I needed to hammer it before I had more important things in life to attend to. However, I’m not going to pretend it was everything I wanted from a Bethesda space RPG. There were things I loved about it, and things I really didn’t love.
The first thing I found annoying (like so many others) was the number of loading screens. There are just too many in this game. Having a decent enough PC helps a bit, but in comparison to Fallout and Elder Scrolls, it’s pretty intense. I also found myself getting frustrated with the menus when trying to get between planets. It’s fiddly as hell. I really think they should have kept the game set in the Sol system and had huge maps hand-crafted for each planet and a few moons. But hey, that’s a whole new article in itself.
Playing the game wasn’t a displeasure, but it also could have been better. When you have the likes of Skyrim in your portfolio, which is so great that people were willing to buy it like 6 times, you’d expect a better experience. Starfield taught us that randomly generated dead planets isn’t what we want as the main feature of a Bethesda RPG. Maybe as an end-game feature it could have been more interesting? I don’t know, to be honest. The game is only fun the first time you play it.
Round 2
When I saw that Starfield had its first DLC released, I didn’t really care too much. I didn’t even have to pay for it since I bought the fanboy premium edition. I just got it whether I wanted it or not. I did do some reading on it, though, and I saw they actually handcrafted a large new map this time. This was a good sign and the right direction to be going. But I was so burned out from it the first time around, I never touched it. Starfield remained uninstalled from my computer, and it wasn’t until this year that I played it again. The last time before that was October 2023. I blitzed it for a solid month, then dropped it.
I then saw that the next DLC was finally coming out along with a new “Free Lanes” update. I figured now was the time to give this game another shot. Surely with all the updates and polish it had received in my downtime, it would be like a whole new experience. Well, I wasn’t right about that, but I wasn’t 100% wrong either.
The game is pretty. There’s no denying that. It looks great on my setup anyway. They have improved the game a lot with all these updates too. The vehicles are pretty cool – no more do I always have to run 2000m to a boring POI; I can get there quick and realise it was only a waste of seconds, no minutes. The local maps also don’t look like crap anymore. Can’t help but think that should have been there on release, but whatever. They’re there now.
I don’t think this update was enough to make me give a shit, though, still. It’s still the same game I blitzed for 100 hours then had enough. It hasn’t been able to pull me back in like Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 all did. Those games had multiple playthroughs with multiple angles attached to them. Starfield doesn’t have that. No matter who you play, I still get the exact same experience, it seems.
Verdict
Maybe I didn’t give it enough of a chance, but I put at least another 10 hours into a new game after the game’s new updates, and I just didn’t care enough to keep going. The “dungeons” are still all the same. The starmap is still full of planets that you have no reason to ever visit apart from pretty aesthetics. The “Free Lanes” thing I found pretty boring, too. I don’t know where the fun is in just standing around and waiting for your ship to reach another planet in real-time. I just ended up using fast-travel and dealing with the many loading screens.
I kind of wish Bethesda just went straight to Elder Scrolls 6 instead of Starfield. It was a cool game for them to do, but in my opinion it should not have been a mainline game. Hopefully this isn’t a reflection on their future titles. Bethesda have been getting way too comfortable with their arrogantly long dev times and selling us the same games over and over, but I still enjoy their products.
So to answer the question in the title – is it good now? Kind of. I guess. It’s okay, but I don’t think I’ll be going back to it again.
Leave a Reply