Posted 23rd September 2023
Starfield doesn't quite scratch the itch that previous Bethesda titles does, but it holds up fairly well as a brand new universe. It's big enough and has enough content to last 100+ hours for a single playthrough but I'm not sure I can see myself coming back again and again like I do for Skyrim.
The small handful of main cities are well built and feel alive with residents filling shops, bars and other buildings. The first city you arrive in looks fantastic but can be a little overwhelming at first without an easy way of navigating with a map as well as being bombarded with a lot of quests. That being said, the quests themselves were interesting and fun to complete and, for the most part, didn't feel like simple fetch quests.
The gunplay mechanics feel a lot smoother than Fallout 4 and is quite a step up which makes it a lot more fun. The powers brought a little Dragonborn into the game which was fun, but admittedly I didn't use them as much as I probably should.
The spaceship building was definitely one of the best aspects of the game. As it's modular, you can get very creative with the shape and focus on different areas (weapons, cargo, crew, speed, etc.)
While there are more planets than you'd probably visit in a playthrough, the procedurally generated nature of how the planets are built took away the normal feeling of a Bethesda title of wanting to explore what's out there. I would look on the horizon of an empty planet, see a structure, and felt it just wasn't worth the time to go over and see what it was because I knew that same structure was going to be somewhere else - I wasn't missing out on not exploring it.
