When I first played The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind in 2002 on my severely underpowered and outdated Compaq Presario from 1999, I immediately became a fan of the work of Bethesda Game Studios. The love that they put into fleshing out that world and making something that felt fresh and modern was apparent almost immediately. It felt so open-ended in a way that few 3D games had achieved up until that point. You could do almost anything and the game wouldn’t end, it would just kind of roll with the situation, and you could either try to live with it or reload your last save. There, of course, had been PC RPGs to achieve things such as this prior to 2002, but I can’t recall anything that had done it at the scale of Morrowind. It was a landmark game.
Fast forward to 2023 and Bethesda Game Studios has released Starfield, their first game based on an original property in decades. A new game where you can create a character, explore over 1,000 planets, and do whatever it is that you want to do. I have spent a couple dozen hours in the world of Starfield and, if I’m being perfectly honest, I am struggling to convince myself that it is worth my time to spend any more of it playing.
Just to get it out of the way, I do not think that Starfield is a terrible game. I think that it does some things well, and I will get into those, but it does a lot of things very poorly. In particular, the things that it does poorly are the criteria that I am judging games on here on Overlevel, so buckle up.
To get started, I am going to focus on the things about the game that I enjoyed. I think that the combat in the game is very good and is without question the best that Bethesda has ever offered. The game’s vision of the expanded Milky Way Galaxy is oftentimes stunning, and its overall visual aesthetic is very nice. When you actually have a reason to do so, the space combat generally feels pretty good and flying around is a good time. There are moments throughout where some of the options presented to you are pretty clever and make you pause to consider which route would be best. It has a great soundtrack that makes what you’re doing often feel like a big deal. Some of the side content can be genuinely fun.
In terms of scale, there certainly is a lot of Starfield. The aforementioned 1,000 planets, several faction subplots, base building, ship building, home ownership, the list goes on of things that you can do in the game. The problem comes when it comes time to motivate yourself to do these things. There are a lot of planets to explore, but once you’ve visited a few of them, you kind of know the drill. Eventually, the only reason I would stop on a planet was to kill whoever on it so I could sell their weapons for credits. After dozens of hours of amassing money to buy a new ship, pay off my house, and do other things it hit me that I didn’t really understand why I was doing these things. You barely see your ship thanks to all of the fast travel (and loading screens). There’s literally no reason to go to your house other than to acknowledge that it is there. Why do I need credits? I completed the Crimson Fleet subplot because it had a huge 250,000 credit payout at the end of it and it didn’t hit me until after I was done that, I had no real reason to amass a bunch of money.
For the purposes of transparency, the one thing I didn’t try doing in Starfield at all was the base building. I genuinely disliked every aspect of base building in Fallout 4, so I didn’t even try it here.
There were moments when doing some of the faction side quests that I was genuinely having fun and felt like I was, ahem, role playing. The headcannon for my character, Johnny 99, was that he was once a hardworking, honest family man who was crushed by the system, turning to a life of crime. I tried to go out of the gate playing as an all-around dickhead, which is why I gravitated towards the Crimson Fleet and Ryujin Industries factions, where things were a bit grey. I had fun doing some of these quests, but at the end of the day I feel like a lot of my roleplaying was in my head. I could still go and be a good guy immediately after and no one would bat an eye. At the worst I may have to pay a 1,200 credit bounty. Most dialogue options were very surface level and in many cases I just chose the option that was going to get me through to the next thing, not what I thought would be most interesting. I didn’t feel like any decision I made actually mattered. I wish that it didn’t force me to pretend like the other factions weren’t there and instead made me choose a path I wanted to take. You shouldn’t be able to just bounce around between all of these diametrically opposed groups as if it is no big deal. Factions are great, but if you can decide to just do everything, then nothing you decide to do actually matters. I would like to see something matter. The game is supposed to be the dungeon master, I shouldn’t have to be my own.
The first major issue I started to notice while playing the game was just how cumbersome all of the menus and systems in place are. After dozens of hours, none of it ever felt intuitive whatsoever. The inventory management is not great. It takes forever to find what you need, digging through menu after menu trying to be as quick as possible. But the inventory system’s woes pale in comparison to the fast travel/map system.
For a game designed to encompass an entire galaxy, full of planets and people, everything is siloed off from everything else. You are on planet A in star system A and you just accepted a quest to go to planet A in star system F. You have to accept the quest, then leave and walk to your ship, then from there you have to select “Map” and then back out of the planet you’re on, then back out of the star system you’re in, then drag your cursor for five seconds to select system F, only to find out that it is just out of your reach, so you have to select system E, then any planet, then fast travel to it. Then when it loads and you get to that planet, then you have to repeat the process again to get to star system F and then select planet A and then find a marker on it.
It is a miserable experience just getting around. But for as bad as this experience is, the absolute worst part of it is the fact that there are no local maps for any of the planets or cities that you go to. You simply cannot glance at a map to examine the nearby area, your only hope for traveling around is to follow the quest marker. For a game that prides itself on being as expansive and open to exploring as Starfield, I find these decisions inexcusable. Nothing in the game feels as if it is a part of a bigger world, they just feel like individual, standalone places.
One of the positives about the game that I mentioned earlier was the space flight. It feels good to fly your ship around and get into dogfights with other ships. Docking other crafts feels nice. My problem with this part of the game is that there is not enough of it. I think it is a crime that something advertised as focusing on space travel ties your hands so much when it comes to using your spacecraft. You should be able to do more than just fly your ships near the planets. You should be able to actually explore, maybe even get lost. I know that they are different games, but this is something that No Man’s Sky nailed pretty much out of the gate, and it is seven years old at this point. Again, you’re working in silos in Starfield, it’s just that they are connected to one another.
If I’m being honest, Starfield, in terms of structure and mechanics, isn’t that different from what Morrowind did 21 years ago. I feel like Bethesda spent the following 10 years getting the most they could out of this structure, and it paid off in Skyrim, which is undoubtedly the best game that they have made. I could overlook so many of these issues if the world was occupied by characters that I cared about. Hell, I don’t have to really care about them, just make me like them a little bit. Everyone just feels so sterile, their dialogue stilted. The story is fine, but again there’s nothing there for me to actually latch onto.
The release of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty did no favors to Starfield. Cities and clubs on Neon, for example, feel absolutely cold and lifeless. Meanwhile similarly styled clubs in Night City feel absolutely full of energy and life, like real people are in there. And this game is nearly three years older than Starfield. It is inexcusable that this game built around space, the final frontier, is devoid of life.
I want to love Starfield, but the reality is that there isn’t a lot for me to love. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3, No Man’s Sky, and Cyberpunk 2077 show that Starfield is outdated and outclassed by many of its contemporaries. It’s a hard one to recommend.
2 Stars: Bad. A disappointing game that has major flaws.
Overlevel 
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