Starfield Review: Explore slowly and immerse yourself in a magical world

Decent space exploration titles don’t arrive every day. Sure, there are a lot of space-themed games out there, but none of them give you the feeling of flying through space and exploring new lands. So when Starfield, Bethesda’s new RPG, was announced and the developer revealed that you’ll be able to explore more than 1,000 planets in space, it attracted a lot of attention. They are the brains behind The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, two well-known Western RPG franchises. And while the team’s recent titles are flawed in various ways, they offer a great package overall.

This time around, the team promises to offer a number of galaxies to explore in the classic Bethesda RPG game loop. That alone was enough to attract me. The 70-odd hours I spent playing Starfield was one of my most pleasant gaming experiences in recent years, and it was made possible thanks to a code provided by the folks at Bethesda. At the same time, some problems are also glaringly obvious. So let’s dive into this in-depth review of Starfield and learn what Bethesda did right and what they can do better.

journey into the unknown

Starfield follows in the footsteps of other classic Bethesda titles and follows the journey of a player-created character. Create using the in-game creator with unique characteristics and character backgrounds. These traits and backgrounds are the gateway to role-playing. Once the preparations are complete, the story begins to unfold. I agree that it’s a painfully slow start, but it also sets the pace of things going forward. I think the first few hours of Starfield reveal how Bethesda wants players to play the game.

The main story follows the journey of an in-game exploration force named Constellation. Led by the charismatic Sarah Morgan, we are able to create parallels with historical adventurers and explorers. You become a member of this group after encountering an elusive artifact that the constellations are tracking to unravel its mysteries. From this point on, it’s up to you how you want to play the game. And to make this journey more enjoyable, you have a companion to take with you. Each voice is uniquely performed.

The main story focuses on artifacts, but the game doesn’t force you to complete it. Starfield wants you to relax and unravel as you explore the planets and various small missions scattered throughout the universe. These, called Activities, are Starfield’s side missions that bring the world to life. These missions were also the parts I enjoyed more than the main story. For example, one of the side activities involves rescuing and liberating a besieged laboratory. This became a long storyline of my character working to ensure the safety of scientists and security guards. Similarly, a random secret document from a dead enemy triggered another quest involving a dead vigilante and his possessions. Aside from these side stories, you can also join one of the four factions in the game and complete their questlines.

Starfield ensures that the world around you is not a derivative product, but something worth exploring. That became clear when a random NPC conversation in neon turned into a small but detailed questline involving investigating a person’s death . I immediately began exploring the world for such stories. Of course, there’s also some distinctive environmental storytelling, where placing items in certain areas can complete the story of that area. In this game, you will spend time exploring the vast universe and planets.

What I’m confused about by Mark is the main questline. I had the same problem I had with Fallout 4, and some of my most memorable moments in the game were in the side activities. Starfield’s story doesn’t happen at all and only picks up in the final hours of the game. At that point, the tension is high and it becomes a race against time. That’s when I fell in love with the game.

Starfield side missions bring the world to life

After completing these side activities and the eventful main quest, the New Game Plus mode begins. Starfield seeks to follow the current multiverse boom in movies and put a twist on it. I’m refraining from giving away any major spoilers leading up to the storyline or NG+, but this game does try to do something clever. Each time you run NG+, your first encounter in the Constellation will change. In our gameplay, we first meet my character standing by the constellation, as at the beginning of the game. This means we are now in another universe, another timeline.

Similarly, multiple people have noted that changes occurred in subsequent NG+ runs. Because of this, I had to quit the game and try it again with my existing character. You carry over your unlocked skills, so you have nothing to lose. However, my complaint is that some late-game or mid-game encounters outside of the Constellation encounter needed to be changed to add more uncertainty to the game. Currently, the only thing that changes in NG+ is the constellation encounters.

The overall plot of Starfield is simple. Skyrim and previous Bethesda games had deeper main stories than this one. However, more thought and focus was given to the game’s side content. That’s where it really shined.

space combat and exploration

Now, it’s called Starfield, so you’d expect Bethesda to have added space exploration. Fortunately, they did. The entire galaxy is open to you and your playground. It’s an open world title, so you can explore planets and star systems. For exploration, Starfield has a reliable spaceship. Several players have complained about Starfield’s spaceship exploration, but I didn’t find it disappointing. I liked that the game allowed you to fast travel to discovered planets and star systems at any time without having to go through a tedious orbit entry and exit sequence.

However, the vast universe is not safe as you may encounter enemies while exploring. Fortunately, you have a spaceship with artillery capabilities to fight these invaders. Spaceship combat works uniquely to ensure even power distribution across weapons, engines, shields, and glaive drives. It becomes an additional mini-game where you try to find the sweet spot.

For example, allocating more power to a weapon system will make it work more effectively, and increasing engine power will increase the speed of a spacecraft. Although this is a simple system, some of the time in space was spent adjusting these settings, adding further complexity.

Go back to exploring and jump from system to system to create your flight chart. So if you want to revisit these systems in the future, you are free to do so. Inside these systems are planets you can land on. Some planets, like gas giants, you may not be allowed to set foot on. But from our experience, we’ve been in most of them. Upon landing, Starfield does this unique thing. There is no going in or out of orbit, so place a waypoint on the planet and land there.

The game randomly generates tiles and places resources, places of interest, and alien lifeforms on them. Resources typically stay in the same location you scanned them from above. Once on land, you’re free to explore on foot . Yes, feet.

Exploration ranges from scanning the planet on foot for resources to checking out randomly generated points of interest. The game doesn’t have an on-screen waypoint map, so you create one through the viewfinder. This item scans and marks places of interest on the map. While I’m at it, Starfield has one of the most brutal maps in video games. This issue will be addressed in a post-release patch, but the current patch is so barebones and useless that it makes you wonder who gave the green light to add it to the game.

This is where my biggest complaint about exploration begins . When your tiles are as large as Fallout 4’s Boston map, you’d expect some form of transportation to be an option. It’s the future, and I think humanity has found a way to store all the vehicles that can run, although I don’t know how. There are cool spaceships and gravity drives, but no drivable cards.

It’s the future, and I think humans have found a way to stowaway vehicles that can run.

If there were no meaningful exploration points in the world, this would become incredibly frustrating and boring. And this is a deliberate decision made by Bethesda. It would be a welcome thing to have optional transportation on Earth. Additionally, planet tiles can have very few meaningful exploration points, making the overall experience boring. Procedural generation is the main culprit here, and I sometimes wonder if the team should have created a few more of these planets and sprinkled in some hand-crafted experiences.

Guns of the future: are they good?

The villains you encounter in space are also wandering around the galaxy on the map. To fight them, Starfield has new age guns classified as standard, rare and unique. Gun performance varies greatly depending on rarity. Certain guns can also fire bullets that deal status damage.

For example, Equinox with poisonous lead. The gunfights are incredible, satisfying, and intense. Bethesda has come a long way since Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. These can make the difference between Fallout 4 and Starfield weapons. It’s difficult to explain in words. Try both games and you’ll notice the difference.

Build your outpost and improve your performance

Since this is an RPG title, Starfield has systems that make you want to roleplay a certain way. The only deciding factor is the skill tree. It is divided into five subsections , with four further divisions. These skills ensure the overall performance of the character. Gameplay changes depending on which skill you choose.

Each unique skill has four divisions, with level 4 being the highest. These are locked and unlocked by meeting the conditions set by the skill. For example, to improve your handgun proficiency, you need to kill a certain number of enemies using the gun. Once you meet the criteria, you will unlock the next level of that particular skill and improve your gun handling.

Mixing and matching these skills changes the overall gameplay experience. My character’s background is that of a former villain, so I focused on spaceship and weapon skills, making him powerful in aerial and foot combat. Additionally, I decided to focus on persuasion to make my character speak smoothly. There are many skills to focus on that target specific play styles.

Another addition that facilitates roleplaying is outposts and shipyards . This game uses both of these. However, their importance is up to the player. First, you can create eight outposts on any of the planets found around the galaxy. These outposts have a variety of functions, including mining, botany, and settlements for people to live.

Starfield utilizes Fallout 4’s settlement builder, but has been tweaked to make it more comfortable. There are two camera perspectives to facilitate structure placement. Better structures are revealed through research conducted through research benches that require components. These are mined and collected from various planets. It leverages components to build structures and emphasizes exploration. Once you understand how it works, you can create a magnificent settlement from scratch. Indeed, we have the necessary components.

Another addition to the game is the shipyard. In it, you can create your own ship apart from ready-made ships. Shipbuilder allows you to purchase or place parts to build or upgrade your spaceship. It’s very deep in terms of customization. I’ve seen people use it to make the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars and the Magic School Bus from the cartoon show of the same name. In terms of accessibility, navigating through the menus and UI is a nightmare . If we made the shipbuilding menu simpler, more people might be able to actively use it. This system can become a core part of space exploration if needed.

However, please note that Outpost and Shipbuilder are optional systems. Fallout 4 removed the urgency to build settlements, but Starfield doesn’t. If you don’t want to do either, the game won’t stop you in the middle. I only used Outpost Builder once throughout my 70-hour playthrough. And I never wanted to touch that feature. The same goes for shipyards.

If you find a spacecraft with good specs, you won’t need to use these systems. Starfield feels like it took some of the existing systems from past Bethesda titles and reworked and polished them for a better experience.

Starfield PC Performance Overview

Since we played this title on PC, we can only speak about our overall experience with Starfield on the same PC. I tried the game on two separate machines. I ran most of my performance tests and playthroughs with the following setup.

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600, running at base clock
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti; playback at 1080p
• SSD: WD SN570 512GB Gen 3 NVME.
• RAM: 16GB DDR4 @ 3000MHz .

Starfield had some performance issues on PC at launch, but we all know that at this point. The reason is that the game is CPU dependent . CPU usage was noticeable at 70%, reaching up to 70% usage on the 4070 Ti. First, I tried the game with the recommended settings. This means everything is now maxed out at 1080p. We preferred not to select FSR2 for testing.

New Atlantis saw a noticeable drop in frames and a spike in CPU/GPU usage, averaging around 72%. At the same time, the frame rate dropped below 64 immediately after going beyond the viewport to the fountain area. If you go to the MAST area of ​​New Atlantis, this drop gets even worse, dropping to 55. In both cases, I haven’t touched any settings. I had a similar experience at Akira City, minus the neon lights. Only a maximum of 63 frames were obtained within the residential area. It worked better on empty planets with only plants and animals to render. We consistently found an average of 125 frames in these cases.

Adjusting several options, such as population density, shadow quality, and volumetric lighting set to medium or high, did little to improve Starfield’s performance. I only saw a gain of 2-3 frames. The same goes for planets. We also tried using the fixes suggested in another article. Unfortunately, the performance improvement here was also negligible. This proves our assumption about CPU-bound games, with the 5600 barely providing the necessary features.

My colleague Upanishad used a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro to play games from 2021. He uses it in his daily activities and even helped me with the Starfield coverage. Therefore, he spent an equal amount of time on the game. The specs for this machine are:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800H
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3070, running at 140W
• SSD: Samsung 970 EVO 1TB
• RAM: 32GB DDR4 @ 5200MHz

In the case of the Upanishads, the situation was even worse. Naturally, he played the title in 2K resolution. The Lenovo Legion 5 pro’s average pull was around 45 FPS. Frame rates exceeded 60 frames in better conditions, mostly on planets. In this case, we were unable to determine whether the CPU or GPU was the culprit. After all, this laptop has a 140-watt RTX 3070, which is more than the 220W standard GPU inside the desktop. Therefore, GPU performance may be degraded.

However, we tested the game using DLSS mods introduced by the community. Upanishad chose a mod by PureDark that uses DLSS 2.0 for the free version, while I chose LukeFz564’s mod. Additionally, we both had new NVIDIA drivers installed. This driver has less effect on 30 series cards, but will improve performance on 40 series cards by 5%.

Returning to the DLSS mod, in the case of Upanishads, we saw performance improvements in places where there was noticeable frame drop. This mod takes advantage of the RTX card’s tenser cores to improve performance. Similarly, in my case, I saw performance improvements in Akira and the New Atlantis Settlements, increasing the framerate from less than 54 frames to 80 frames. This number improved further only on emptyer planets. Of course, the new NVIDIA drivers come into play here as well. Neon averaged 65 frames, but consistently 75 with V-sync on.

Overall, if you have a CPU less than a Ryzen 5 5600, you’re out of luck. Bethesda has added official DLSS support and is committed to working with GPU manufacturers to improve performance through driver updates. Time will tell how effective these efforts are.

Starfield review: Should you buy it?

“Starfield” is by no means a perfect title. There are drawbacks to that. Starfield certainly has its problems, whether it’s performance inconsistencies, occasional bugs, missing basic QoL features from the PC port, or a lackluster main story. However, it also has the unique appeal of Bethesda RPGs, with a comprehensive world to explore along with bespoke storylines and environmental storytelling.

Admittedly, with over 1,000 planets and over 100 solar systems, the game can sometimes feel overly grand and ambitious. But when you factor in 100 planets with handcrafted materials, solid gunfights, handcrafted side missions, and even an ambitious main story, it’s hard not to root for this game. My best time in Starfield was spent roleplaying as a neon space villain on my character’s home planet.

This game wants you to slow down, enjoy exploration, and let things happen naturally. And I’m here for that. Please try the game once. If you don’t want to buy it, get Xbox GamePass and try it out. You won’t be disappointed.

Buy Starfield ( $69.99 )