By: Alex Tilton

I find it helpful to have a word limit on these reviews because it forces me to do a better job with less space. It’s something Bethesda Softworks should have embraced because their unlimited budget and development time yielded an occasionally fun, but badly bloated game with frustrating mechanics and a crappy plot. All of this sucked, but the nail in the coffin was the nihilistic, lazy, and insulting main story.

So, what is the story? You are an explorer for an organization called Constellation looking for fragments of an alien artifact that grants superpowers and causes strange visions. The Bad Guy is some faceless dude in an advanced spacesuit with a fancy ship who also wants the fragments and is willing to kill to get them. That’s the plot. Now for the problems.

::sigh:: Where to begin?

Right from the start you find yourself desperately searching for how to bring up an area map that you can’t find. I eventually Googled it and discovered that it doesn’t exist. It bears mentioning at this point that Starfield was in development for eight years. So just finding your way around on foot is an enormous pain in the ###. Cool. Good start.

Next you learn to fly your starship. The controls are

the same as always, but you have to manually distribute the power from the reactor to different systems like engines, weapons and shields. But in practice this doesn’t end up mattering very much, and eventually you get a better ship with power to spare,

so why bother? But it doesn’t really matter because in this game (called ‘Starfield’) most space travel consists entirely of loading screens and is done entirely by accessing a map menu…whether you’re on your ship or not.  And all the planets you go to are mostly void. They have a few points of interest scattered around an immense empty landscape that takes a long time to run across, which you have to do because you can’t fast travel anywhere that you haven’t already been. A dune buggy would have fixed this, but there isn’t one.

There is some good stuff to report: the space combat was a lot of fun and they did a good job with it. Missing area map aside I enjoyed a lot of the ground missions and generally I thought they were worth the time. Some of the longer side quests were excellent and deserve high praise.

There’s also a ship building feature (with no tutorial whatsoever) and an outpost building tool (with a bare-bones tutorial that barely helps). A lot of people are having a lot of fun with these, but they’re 100% optional. And since nothing in the game’s story ever forces you to use either one, I didn’t.

But the real problem is with the core story. Spoilers ahead but read it anyway because this game doesn’t deserve your time.

Returning to the plot; you travel around the galaxy collecting identical alien artifacts, and getting superpowers from identical rooms in almost identical temples located on otherwise empty planets, getting the same identical cut scene every time. Eventually the bad guy (imaginatively named ‘The Hunter’) who also wants the artifacts, attacks you. You fend him off and this impresses him so you sit down to talk to him and his rival ‘(the equally imaginatively named ‘Emissary’). The Emissary actually is introduced earlier but, it isn’t made clear that at that point that this is a separate person, which turns out to be highly appropriate.

At this meeting they reveal that there’s more to the artifacts than granting superpowers. If you collect em’ all, they form a machine that gives you the ability to leave this universe and go to another universe… where you can collect em’ all again, gain more superpowers and ultimately leave that universe… and then do it all again ad infinitum, with no ultimate goal. So, the artifacts are basically components in a Groundhog Day device. The Villian says he’s been doing this for many years and flat out admits that he’s not sure why he still bothers.

Then the game gives you three choices; you can 1) Side with The Hunter and join a nihilistic death loop that goes on forever for no reason, or you can 2) Side with The Emissary and join a nihilistic death loop that goes on forever for no reason, or you can 3) Tell them both to shove it, collect the artifacts yourself…and join a nihilistic death loop that goes on forever

for no reason. The Hunter also points out that there

are also infinite other versions of you (and him, and The Emissary) all running around doing the same thing. I don’t know about you but that sure made me feel special.

But I do have to congratulate Bethesda for generating a wonderful opportunity to study cognitive dissonance; The psychological phenomenon where people try to convince themselves that something that sucked was actually great, so they don’t have to feel like fools for buying it. Starfield defenders often respond to criticisms of the game with two statements: 1) “Your expectations were too high” or 2) “Was this your first Bethesda game?”

Statement 1 is funny because it basically admits that high expectations were unwarranted. Never mind that those high expectations came from Bethesda’s excellent previous games like Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim and years of Starfield hype from Bethesda itself. Statement 2 is meant to imply that you’re an outsider, and therefore you probably just ‘don’t get it.’ It’s the old fallacy of attacking the critic rather than responding to the criticism. The game is fine, the deficiency is in you. But even if it were true playing another Bethesda game first would make this one enjoyable, that is still an unacceptable flaw in any game. And in any case, it’s not true. I put an embarrassing number of hours into Skyrim…and I still thought Starfield sucked.

Image Sources: IGN.com, Bethesda.net, Theverge.com