Starfield

I actually beat the main quest in STARFIELD last week. By my standards, this is fast – I first started playing SKYRIM in 2011, and I finally beat the main quest in autumn 2020 on the Switch version, since that was during the height of Covid and there wasn’t much else to do.

So, my thoughts on the game.

Overall, I would say I really liked it. It really does capture the feel of being a competent space adventurer wandering around the galaxy. You can do bounty hunting, pirate hunting, mining, exploring, and a variety of other stuff. Like, back in the 90s I really liked WING COMMANDER: PRIVATEER, which had infinite random missions, and STARFIELD kind of feels like an enormously expanded version of PRIVATEER. Or like PRIVATEER with a HALO game attached to it, given the wide variety of firearms you can obtain.

In the grand tradition of Bethesda games, you don’t even have to do the main quest or any of the scripted side quests – you can just wander around visiting random planets and fighting space pirates forever. Honestly, I probably spent more time playing randomly generated side missions than any of the scripted quests.

That said, I very much liked some of the scripted side quest missions. The Vanguard plotline was the best of them, in my opinion – you have to help the United Colonies find the origins of a super-deadly alien predator called a Terrormorph, and at the end there’s a a genuinely hard moral question – does the greater good justify the means for people in positions of authority?

The game has also improved quite a bit since launch with new patches – the updates added a city map feature, which is massively useful, and a Space Car you can use for driving across planetary surfaces, which makes a lot of the game’s missions quite a bit simpler and easy.

While I enjoyed STARFIELD, I concede that many of its critics had a point about its weaknesses. The game relies a lot on procedural generation. Every time you land on a planet, a bunch of nearby dungeons and features are randomly generated. This can get repetitive, though I don’t mind that very much – it makes it easy to play the game in bite-sized chunks when I’m late and it’s tired and I just want to mow down some Space Pirates or something. What is annoying is that sometimes the procedurally generated locations don’t match with the procedurally generated quests, and you can’t finish some of the quests. That was really irritating, though it tends to only happen at very high levels.

The game’s main plot revolved around multiverse stuff, and as I’ve mentioned, I’m not a big fan of the multiverse as a storytelling concept. However, it works better in a video game than in a movie or a book, and STARFIELD’s implementation of it is quite clever. Many games have the New Game Plus concept, where you start a new game but things are slightly different. In STARFIELD, when you go to a new universe, you lose all your possessions, but you keep all your skills and knowledge, so you’re starting the new game at level 65 or whatever. Additionally, a lot of the quests are altered because your character knows in advance what is going to happen from the previous universe, so you can get a better outcome than you did the last time.

Which is perhaps a compelling journey – to go from universe to universe and Put Right What Once Went Wrong.

Anyway, I enjoyed STARFIELD, and will definitely play the SHATTERED SPACE expansion when it comes out at the end of the month.

-JM