‘Starfield’ Is Bethesda’s Surprising Masterpiece

As I creep into middle age, it’s time to admit to myself that I love Bethesda games. I’ve been playing them for 30 years and my love has always come with caveats. I’ve played Fallout 4 for more than 200 hours, about 50 of that in VR. An obsessive playthrough of Fallout 3 didn’t exactly destroy my first marriage, but it didn’t help. Once, when I got the flu, I did a 90 hour playthrough of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion just to kill time.

Despite this damning evidence, when asked about my interest in Bethesda games I would hedge and harp. “Fallout 4 feels good, but that story is terrible,” I’d say, and, “Skyrim is OK but those character animations are really stiff.” And the classic, “Bethesda really lost a step after Morrowind.”

Starfield rid me of this kind of thinking. It’s a slow burn, and for its first 20 hours I kept telling myself that it was fine, a normal Bethesda game that people will enjoy and critics will say was only ever just OK after the initial hype fades. It was another notch in Bethesda’s belt, merely “Fallout in space.” Sure, it would be a success. But would anyone remember it fondly? 

After finishing its main quest, I now believe Starfield is Bethesda’s best game. This is its masterpiece.

During my time in Starfield I fell in with pirates, watched systems of power co-opt a street gang into the ruling order, battled through a derelict ship with failing gravity, and listened to the religious thoughts of snake-worshiping nihilists. I built a ship brimming with lasers, learned how to manufacture and smuggle illegal drugs, and chased a singing captain across the galaxy. I finished the game’s main story at level 30, logging about 30 hours of play. In typical Bethesda fashion, this only represents a fraction of what’s on offer in Starfield. My colleague Jordan Pearson has logged about 50 hours of playtime and has barely touched the main quest, instead preferring to get lost in a sea of complex side quests. 

Finishing the game’s main quest made me want to play it more, and I’ve since put in another 15. It’s all I want to talk about and it’s all I want to play. I’ve barely touched Armored Core 6 and have stalled outside of the entrance of the titular city in Baldur’s Gate 3. I expected to have a good time. I did not expect to fall in love.

A universe of stories

In many ways, Starfield is the game people are expecting. The side content is always better than the main event in a Bethesda game, and Starfield leans into this. The main quest is MacGuffin-driven, while the side content is deep, specific, and impressively gritty. Cities are complex nests of unique NPCs where it feels as if every shopkeeper or person on the street has a quest chain they want you to go on. Random encounters can spiral out into hours-long adventures. One example: Getting caught during a routine scan for contraband resulted in getting brought into a plan to go undercover with a pirate crew. The player explores an abandoned prison on an ice planet and a gala on a luxury starliner, has a shootout in a bank vault, infiltrates a military installation, and that is not even the end of a single side questline in Starfield. 

In other, very important and welcome ways, Starfield blows up the expectations that I had for a Bethesda title. Unfortunately, due to embargo restrictions, we can’t talk about those (more on that later). 

Starfield can be overwhelming at first. NPCs constantly mention threads and rumors to you that fill up your quest log with an absurd amount of activities. I spent most of my time in the cyberpunk city of Neon, working the drug trade and ingratiating myself with the city’s unseemly underbelly. There’s likely dozens of hours of activity here, including quests that begin in other locales and eventually take you to Neon, and I left a lot of it undone. And this is just one city on one planet; I visited several other major cities just as full of life as Neon. 

The writing and quality of these quests is all over the place. Some are well-acted, well-written, and have multiple paths to success including combat, persuasion, or subterfuge. Others are rote and boring—amounting to fast-traveling between a few locations to have various conversations—and you never quite know how good one will be when you start it. But there’s always another one around the corner and you can always simply decide to walk away.

Many of Starfield’s systems feel designed to force players to explore. Mission boards scattered around have repeatable procedurally generated quests. One of these quests wanted me to deliver cargo to a far flung moon I’d never stepped foot on. I figured I’d be landing on a bare-bones outpost and talking to a generic NPC to make the delivery. I was shocked to discover the moon had a whole city where people did a Colonial Williamsburg thing, but for early space travel. It was a living museum where people lived as the early space settlers did. A bit overwhelmed and beset by chatty NPCs, I delivered the goods and fled into the stars with the knowledge that I could always return and uncover whatever stories were there.

A different kind of Bethesda RPG

Starfield upends the formula that Bethesda popularized with Skyrim and Fallout. In those games, the player is plopped into an open natural world and then explores, killing monsters and running into populated towns and settlements. Here, the player is thrown into dense, NPC-filled hubs stuffed with conversations. 

When a player does land on a planet to do a bit of space hiking, the game generates points of interest around the area of the ship, usually an abandoned mine or an outpost. There’s usually two or three unique points of interest on each planet, but most are repeated caves and geological landmarks. Some of these will contain tiny quests—go kill some pirates—but most do not. You’ll fast-travel just about everywhere, and nearly every location, including interiors, is prefaced with a short loading screen (thankfully, these typically last only a few seconds). This is not an “open-world” game.

That doesn’t mean Starfield’s locations don’t feel huge, with a lot of freedom to traverse. You can fast travel around the densely populated central hub of New Atlantis, but you can also jog between locations. Want to climb to the top of buildings in the city, fling yourself off, and use a boostpack to reach the wilds outside of it? You can do that.

It’s easy to spend hours just talking to people about their lives and troubles, and stumbling across quests. I once met a random trader on a planet that had a giant lizard and we chatted about how her mother left it to her after she died before I bought some medpacks from her and left.

But the worlds are not infinite, and there are boundaries. The generation of the planets is closer to how Bethesda made Arena and Daggerfall, and less like Skyrim or Fallout. Each planet has a number of tiles wrapped around it, and the player can land on any of those tiles, but players can only explore so far away from the ship before they encounter a barrier that will send them back. 

This approach will no doubt be controversial for some who enjoyed the hand-crafted, open-world style of previous Bethesda games. Already, some discussion around Starfield has turned acrid as gamers angrily lament that they can't, say, walk around the entire circumference of a planet (which sounds pretty boring). But Starfield’s gameplay, centered around dense hubs filled with stories, is also a massive achievement that suits the game’s ethos: space is big, environmentally hostile, and relatively empty. But where people are huddled together in tin cans of various sizes, there is life in abundance. 

Also found in abundance: systems. Players can buy houses on multiple planets, build outposts, collect ships and outfit them to their heart’s desire in Starfield’s surprisingly deep ship builder. There are game-changing systems that players will keep discovering throughout their entire playthrough of the main quest, keeping the surprises coming. Bethesda’s review embargo prevents us from discussing many elements of the later game, but when I described the new systems that emerge to my colleague Pearson, he replied, “What the fuck?”

Bethesda has always been good at game feel. Fallout and Skyrim feel satisfying to play. The loop of discovering a new place, looting everything inside, and taking that loot to town always felt good. Starfield has improved it. Combat feels more punchy and visceral than past titles. This isn’t Destiny 2 or Doom, but pulling the trigger on a weapon feels better than it has in past Bethesda RPGs. VATS isn’t needed.

The roleplaying mechanics as expressed in skill points are satisfying. Pickpocketing, for example, is its own skill, and you could go the entire game without doing it. By the end of the main quest, I’d run out of ammunition for most of my pistols and used every single healing item in my inventory. Could I have prepared better and learned how to make my own health kits and bullets? Absolutely, but I invested my skill points elsewhere. It made some parts of the game easier, but it made some of the final encounters much more difficult.

On both my PC and my Xbox Series X, Starfield ran well and had few issues, but this is still a Bethesda game. NPCs have a strange wooden feel and often can’t quite figure out where they’re supposed to look when you talk to them. It’s not that their eyes wander, it’s that their whole body occasionally spins and they speak over their shoulder. Once, a companion T-posed inside the cockpit of my ship blocking a portion of my field of vision. I had one hard crash, a lot of weird audio bugs, and a strange visual flair that wouldn’t go away until I reset the game. But on the sliding scale of Bethesda releases, Starfield is a high point. In terms of stability and bugs, it’s the polar opposite of the disastrous Fallout 76 launch, and leagues ahead of where Cyberpunk 2077 was when it debuted. Most of what I encountered only made me roll my eyes and the worst offenders were fixed after restarting the game. Pearson did encounter a nasty save bug that resulted in losing about 7 hours of game time, but after a recent patch that issue hasn’t come up. 

What we can’t talk about 

Writing an embargoed review of Starfield is frustrating. It’s a game that reveals itself in its final act and Bethesda does not want anyone who got review copies of the game to talk about it with any specificity. Review copies of games always come with such stipulations, but this one feels particularly onerous. There are whole systems in Starfield that make the game an instant classic. And it doesn’t want reviewers to talk about them.

This is a shame, because the game’s opening feels a bit like a fake-out. Starfield has the most perfunctory-seeming opening and main quest of any recent Bethesda title. Players begin as a miner on a backwater moon. As you work, you find a weird capital-a Artifact which gives you mysterious visions. Then you make your character, pirates attack, and a guy shows up with the keys to your first starship and the location of the first major city, where the player is instantly beset by chatty side quests. 

In short: the main quest starts off formulaic and unobtrusive, arguably the studio’s least interesting, before turning into something so exciting that I rushed to finish it.

If a player pursues the main quest, they’ll land on New Atlantis and meet Constellation, a group of painfully earnest space explorers that often feel incongruous with the gritty, crime-filled side quests. There’s a religious guy, a corporate guy, a tough-as-nails pulp heroine with a British accent, a sneaky woman with a mysterious past, a sarcastic guy with a tragic past, a robot, and a space cowboy. Mileage will vary, but I found most of these characters fairly dull. Sam Coe, the space cowboy, felt like a Harlequin romance character. He’s a roughneck, but he’s also the exiled scion of a rich colonial family, and he’s got a daughter that he takes with him everywhere.

Constellation sends you out to explore the Settled Systems and collect Artifacts, which feels like typical Bethesda scaffolding. And then, a little over halfway through, there’s a twist and the story gets weird and interesting. It changed the way I played the game. I had to know how it all ended, and what, mechanically, Bethesda planned to do. Starfield sticks the landing in a way I could not imagine. The last few hours of its main campaign are a delight and, since finishing it, all I’ve wanted to do is play more Starfield and talk to someone else who had finished the main quest.

Reader, not having someone else to talk to about the back half of Starfield is killing me. So is dancing around the review embargo restrictions. Bethesda has hidden some wild surprises from its audience, and it almost feels as if Starfield embodies two different games. One is what everyone expected: a deep universe filled with interconnected optional quest lines and a ton of systems that will occupy players for dozens of hours. 

The second game is something different. It’s the one made by a studio at the height of its powers, one that understands its strengths and the way players interact with their games. It’s what makes Starfield a masterpiece and I can’t wait for people to discover it so I can talk to them about it.