Our first evening with Starfield – first impressions of Bethesda’s open galaxy adventure

Starfield – failure to launch (pic: Microsoft)

GameCentral begins its review coverage of Starfield with a detailed look at the opening hours and initial missions.

A theoretical Han Solo simulator has long been our dream game. For decades there’s been almost nothing that comes even close to that idea and now suddenly there’s both Starfield and Star Wars Outlaws. Neither is exactly what we had in mind, but we can only hope that they’re both successes, so that it encourages even more space travel games and more chances at a dream come true.

From that perspective alone we were very much looking forward to Starfield, even if the almost complete lack of hands-ons previews was highly suspicious. Bethesda has never taken criticism well though and so it was little surprise to find them trying to withhold review copies until the last minute – although the bizarre logic they used for who did and didn’t get a copy until now was certainly unexpected.

Their actions immediately birthed a host of conspiracy theories but, as ever, the simplest explanation was the correct one: they were trying to hide the fact that the game’s not very good. It’s also not very bad, but the one thing we didn’t expect is what a poor first impression the game makes. And that is likely what Bethesda has been most concerned about.

If we were scoring Starfield’s marketing campaign we’d give it a straight 10/10, as that 30 minute preview at the Xbox Games Showcase was fantastic and seemed to suggest a classic for the ages – a sci-fi version of Skyrim that allowed you to do anything and go anywhere. However, last year’s gameplay footage gave a truer picture of the game, where it was more obvious that it was the same old Elder Scrolls/Fallout formula, just with a slightly different coat of paint.

We’ve played around three or four hours now, including the first three story missions and a few side activities; the game starts out with you cast as a lowly miner, who discovers a mysterious metal artefact that a semi-secret group of explorers called Constellation have been looking for. Touching the artefact gives you a brief vision (that is highly reminiscent of a similar scene in Mass Effect) which instantly convinces a Constellation rep to give you their spaceship and robot, and induct you into their club.

None of this makes much sense but it all moves along at a welcomingly fast pace. Naturally, the first mission is a tutorial in all but name and it introduces you to all the core elements of the gameplay. You also get a first impression of the game’s visuals and while the underground cave you find yourself in looks fairly good, and the facial animation is a definite step up from Bethesda’s usual potato-faced people, both are still clearly behind the current gen technology curve.

More worrying is the unsatisfyingly frictionless way in which you move about, in either first or third person views, which feels more like you’re levitating than controlling a human character with two feet on the ground. The combat is also very flat; it’s a major step up from Fallout but that’s hardly saying much and it’s a world away from the tactile pleasures of something like Destiny, even though there is an awful lot of combat in Starfield.

However, Destiny is a straight shooter and Starfield is a bone fide role-playing game, and what we did like is that that you can try and talk your way out of a fight from the very start. Although in most cases this results in a weird mini-game, where you’ve got to use dialogue lines of increasing influence before you run out of time, although whether even the safest ones work or not seems to be random (or based on some internal dice roll the game doesn’t share with you).

Luckily, the space pirates that are your first opponents are pushovers and after they’re dealt with it’s into space to learn how ship combat works. As old school fans of X-Wing and TIE Fighter we were actually pretty impressed by this part of the game, as while it’s very easy at this stage there’s a mechanic where you have to shunt power between your weapons, shields, and engines that’s obviously inspired by LucasArts’ old games.

Not only that but you have to lead the target, to compensate for the travel time of your bullets and lasers, with the latter used to take out shields and the former to do physical damage once they’re down. You can also quickly unlock the ability to target individual components, such as the engines, so you can cripple and then board a ship.

There is a major problem with the spaceship side of things though, which is perhaps the biggest and most baffling surprise of the game. Despite all the talk of exploration and navigating the inky blackness of space you don’t actually fly anywhere yourself. Apart from combat, your spaceship is almost entire superfluous, since the game encourages you to use fast travel at all times, right from the start.

Starfield – at least the starship combat seems decent (Picture: Microsoft)

You’re advised by an early tutorial to simply press the ‘X’ button on the mission selection menu and let the game choose your destination from the starmap, from which you then just hold down a button and instantly arrive at your location. Not only that but outer space is just an empty 3D box completely divorced from whichever planet you’re above, with landing and take-off all happening on autopilot in a brief cut scene.

Fast travel is not only encouraged in space but on the ground too, as you’re able to just point in the direction of you ship and instantly travel there – presumably in an attempt to avoid backtracking. Or you can pick any other named location on a planet to instantly get there on foot (there don’t seem to be any ground vehicles). Starfield is basically Fast Travel: The Game and it completely destroys any sense of exploration or immersion.

It’s worse than even that sounds because there’s an ugly big loading screen when using fast travel on the ground and even when entering buildings there’s a loading pause that’s so slow and noticeable it’s hard to believe that this is a current gen-only release.

No one goes into a Bethesda game expecting state of the art technology, but a lot of the texture work is very basic, with planets in particular looking unimpressive and under-detailed – which is the sort of thing you’d expect Bethesda would want to lavish particular care on. Not only are human faces mediocre but the animation in general is poor, with one dinosaur-like creature jerking around like he was animated by Ray Harryhausen.

Although that may have been a bug, it’s hard to tell, as while this is relatively jank-free for a Bethesda game we saw plenty of instances of the physics engine and lighting system going awry. The AI for opponents is also really bad and, again, we don’t know if it’s always like that or if it’s just a bug. What we do know is that the number of times we just walked up to someone and fired at them from point blank range, without them having any idea we were there, was ludicrous.

The absolute worst bug was when the game mixed up the waypoint for the next step in the current mission with one for an unconnected side quest. What we needed to do was find the house of a local but since the game wouldn’t tell us where it was, and there was no proper clues in the game world, we just had to start going door-to-door. Which was made extra absurd by the fact that that it was the childhood home of the companion we had with us, and yet there was no option to simply ask him where he lived.

To compound things further there is, incomprehensibly, no map for when you’re on a planet’s surface. Instead, there are little kiosks listing which area of town a building or person is in, but no indication of how to get there. We can only assume GPS must be outlawed in Bethesda’s vision of the future.

The first impressions of Starfield are not those of a potential game of the year. However, there is good stuff in here. The space combat has potential; we haven’t got to any of the ship or weapon customisation yet; and we like the way the skill tree works, where you have to complete little achievement-like tasks to unlock the option to upgrade an ability.

The dialogue’s very prosaic but it gets its points across quickly and efficiently, with no conversation going on for more than a few lines, which we appreciate. But there’s too much here that is either near identical to previous Bethesda titles (do lockpicking mini-games really make sense in space?) or are merely upgraded from outright bad to mediocre (the graphics and combat).

No matter what else the game gets wrong though it’s the space navigation and obsession with fast travel that is the most preposterous. It’s an abject failure of both game design and technology, as well as being an unintended admission that travelling through the game world(s) is something so tedious you’ll want to avoid it from the very first moment.

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Perhaps that will be compensated for once open exploration becomes more viable, away from the main story path, but as far as we’ve got now many elements of Starfield feel peculiarly amateurish, especially given how much an indie game like No Man’s Sky has accomplished with only a fraction of the budget.

It’s going to be a long time before we can offer a final verdict on Starfield (at least a week, we’d imagine) but while there are positives here this is not the game we expected, and we don’t think we’re going to be along in thinking that…

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed) and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: Bethesda
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Release Date: 6th September 2023*
Age Rating: 18

*Buying the Digital Premium Edition or Constellation Edition grants early access from 1st September.

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GameCentral begins its review coverage of Starfield with a detailed look at the opening hours and initial missions.