Starfield is afraid of letting you face the consequences of your actions
Fallout: New Vegas is hands down one of my favourite games ever made, and especially from the stable of Bethesda-published games. Why? It's a masterclass in setting up a compelling story while giving you unabashed freedom to break it and face the consequences, if you want to.
Want to get halfway through a core questline and decide to murder a key character? Go for it, but you're sure as hell going to face the consequences of that decision — be it factions turning against you, followers departing, or even whole sections of the game becoming unexplorable, just because you closed a door.
Starfield is a stunning experience and in many ways a generation-defining entry as we'll no doubt be mining it for information, Easter eggs, and more for years to come.
But where it succeeds in wrangling all of its moving parts and ideas into something that just about works, it's also so afraid to let you take big swings of your own that I always felt more of a tourist looking through a highlight reel of expedition notes and photos than actually exploring myself.
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In the run-up to its release, Starfield was pitched — or maybe more perceived to be — the ultimate space exploration RPG with all the beautiful Bethesda-isms we could ever want. Once the game got into the wild, it was clear over time a lot of features we may have expected (rightly or wrongly) weren't there, and this was an entirely different beast.
Yes, you can fly, but more in a tabletop-RPG idea of flying, not the anime lines in the sky and rough landings you'd expect from something like Elite Dangerous.
Planets are numerous and vast, but procedural generation makes for less interesting planets than the hand-crafted ones, and while you can walk from end to end of these planets, should you have some hours to kill, they're separated into tiles so it's not quite the seamless experience you'd imagine.
And this is all before mentioning the loading screens, of which there are quite a lot. I mean, really, even for Bethesda, it's a lot.
There are a lot of features to manage in Starfield, too. Outposts are a reinvention of Fallout 4's base building, allowing you not only to have a home base on any distant moon you choose but also to mine and transport materials in the background. Scanning planets allows you to delve into the flora and fauna of systems and see what materials can be mined.
Should you want to go full gearhead, you can build the spaceship of your dreams — there's already a rich community of Starfield fans recreating iconic ships from TV and film.
You can go full Boba Fett and hunt bounties, or join the high seas of space piracy and rob vessels all over the settled systems. There's even contraband to be found, from harvested organs and stolen artwork to illegal scientific research and mech parts, which you'll need to sell on the black market while also shielding your cargo hold to avoid being caught.
Almost all of this can be totally ignored for your entire time with the game. It basically goes unexplained during your playthrough too, which isn't necessarily a bad thing — no one enjoys being force-fed mechanics they don't click with.
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But it adds to Starfield feeling the clichéd mile wide and inch deep — scared of having the player get too bogged down in consequences, and scared of having the player miss out on the potential story paths laid out in front of them.
If I'm with a companion who happens to hate crimes of any kind or going against the USC (I’m looking at you, Sarah Morgan), why don't they call me out for stealing a case of harvested organs and selling them to a nefarious trade authority?
And when you're scanned and found carrying contraband, often the consequence is just a fine and any stolen items confiscated. It's missing something deeper.
This desire to avoid consequences extends to good old-fashioned murder. I'm not saying I want to shoot everyone in sight, but it quickly becomes obvious that any key characters — hell, even anyone with an actual name that isn't 'Akila City Citizen' or 'USC Security' — can't be permanently offed. Even characters you know will eventually become enemies can't be attacked until the precise moment Starfield has decided they should be.
On a handful of occasions, firing back at bounty hunters out for my blood led to my companions becoming angry at me for my lust for 'killing the innocent' — despite, just moments before, taking pleasure in a room full of scientists being wiped out because the quest said it was okay.
It's a shame, because so many of the crafted questlines have such interesting premises, playing one faction off another in the way Bethesda loves to handle moral ambiguity. But all too often, they end abruptly with basically no consequence for your actions aside from losing access to a potential minor crewmate.
With areas like Neon and The Well swarming with space scoundrels and pirates, it would have been great to see some kind of morality scale of consequences playing a part somehow. Hang around the wrong crowd, break laws, and sell black market organs? Maybe you can only sneak into certain planets and walk freely in the darker back-streets, for fear of getting caught.
Despite these negatives, it's impossible to say Starfield is a bad game. I've spent over a hundred hours exploring its universe.
I've picked factions and pissed some off, gotten married, become space Batman, and built a ship my inner child would be proud of. There's so much to do and see, and when I've not been playing it, I've been thinking about playing it. It has that Bethesda secret sauce that can do this to me.
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In many ways, the game's systems fighting with each other is often what makes Bethesda games so memorable. The same engine that lets you drop a thousand potatoes or milk cartons around the environment and watch them cascade realistically also has quirky 'bugs' like puddles which somehow give you access to an entire shop's inventory.
Bending and breaking the game, along with modding, is as much a part of the experience as anything else, for better or worse.
In Starfield, this blend and culmination of ideas sometimes pays off in wonderful ways — but sometimes it falls short, because pushing too far in one direction would mean committing to an idea. Consequences.
There are hints within the game's systems that suggest maybe Starfield was something else entirely during its development — perhaps a survival sim that has long since been abandoned. With how safe Starfield currently plays things, I can't help but wonder what that would have been like.
As you hop from planet to planet in your ship, you’ll notice the HUD telling you how much fuel the journey will cost. The further you go, the more fuel it'll take. There's one problem, though. You don’t ever need to buy fuel or even refill your ship. Sure, you can pick up various fuel littered around the universe, but beyond selling it or using it as a crafting resource, it's pointless.
Scanning planets and setting up outposts currently feels detached from the current experience. It's there and you can do it, but it doesn't add much to the experience in any meaningful way.
The same can be said of ailments and injuries you'll face along the way. Each planet has its own climate and conditions — meaning you might develop a lung problem, suffer sprains from high jumps in denser gravity, or face radiation poisoning in planets steeped in the stuff.
In a survival sim, these would all be life-or-death issues that could turn the tide as you decide whether to press on scanning for materials and precious fuel. But as you don't need those things and you can just consume one of the many hundreds of health items you'll find along the way to clear all ailments, it's just not a bother. Another little speed bump in the road that could have been a landmine. But that would mean you'd have to suffer some consequences for your actions.
And we know how Bethesda feels about those.
Platform reviewed on: Xbox Series X
Starfield is out now on Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Game Pass.
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