Game Review
Starfield First Impressions

* The following is after a month of play where the focus has been on playing through the story. Certain game mechanics, such as Outposts, have only briefly been explored.

Overall Assessment

It’s like Fallout: New Vegas in space, with elements of Fallout 4. There are guns, quests, and stories – big and small.  You have Companions, locations full of things to find, and large landscapes to impress and appreciate. You even get a game opening that people are already working on mods to let you skip.

The story is about par with other Bethesda games. The number of side quests, radiant quests, and factions are about the same. The radiant quests are better than in Fallout 4, more fun and less likely to get old as quick.

But what’s the same about this game is easily trumped by what’s new:

What’s Good?

• Characters, animations, and environments are all improved from Fallout 4
• Factions are interesting and have good stories
• You can fight the pirates or become one.
• The best addition is the ships
  • You can buy ships or steel ships.
  • You can modify or tear them down and start from scratch.
  • You get space combat and can take the enemy ship as your prize.
  • You can even hire crew that are separate from Companions
• New Game Plus style
  • You finished the story? Great! Now start over with the same character, no need for a new game.
  • Infinite replayability with the same character: play the story over, or play like you’ve done it once and know everything.

It’s definitely a Bethesda game, complete with bugs, compelling conundrums, and moral choices to keep you up at night.

Where did Bethesda Fail?

• It’s the same engine, so susceptible to the same bugs.
• Outposts
  • Same as in Fallout 4 with the Settlements system, the Starfield developers didn’t complete what they started.
  • Definitely unbalanced versus normal gameplay
    • Power leveling via Outpost building is a thing
  • The storage system is not great
    • No infinite storage.  There are separate containers for mineral, liquid, or gas; but they only provide limited storage.
    • Crafted items can be kept in a warehouse, apparently? But it’s behind and research wall.
• Starfield is not a flight simulator. 
  • They had to add space dust, or debris, or an asteroid field in order for you to feel like you’re traveling in space.
    • Planets and moons don’t grow or shrink, they are locked bodies.
    • You can’t actually fly from one to the next without using the nav screen. 
  • Space combat is pretty much point and shoot.
    • A lot of jousting, like in Star Wars Squadron
  • Flying from point A to point B is: point, click, animated loading screen.
    • No fun atmospheric entry
    • If you’ve landed once at a settlement, you never get that landing animation again.
    • Fast travel is possible from planet to planet, which is not immersive.

Conclusion

Overall, I’ve enjoyed my time with this game, and I’m going to continue playing.

Maybe I was merely hoping for a space flight simulator, and was disappointed when I didn’t get it.  It could use some improvement, but we’ll have to wait and see what the modders do.

After I get a chance to play with the Outpost system–and experience more of the game after Bethesda puts out a few more updates–I’ll be able to give a better assessment of the overall game.  I’m also looking forward to when Bethesda released mod support, as there are are some already, but nothing too complicated has been tried yet.

Overall, as if this writing, my rating for this game is 7.5 out of 10.  

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To see the Live review and reactions, check out the following link.  The Mariner’s Review begins around the 1 hour 34 minute mark.