Starfield is the most boring game I’ve played in years – Reader’s Feature

Starfield – it can be a bit slow (Picture: Bethesda)

A reader tries out Starfield on Game Pass and is disappointed by its repetition and lack of advancement over Skyrim and Fallout 4.

So, it’s been a bit of a crazy couple of weeks recently, with all the hype for Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3. Two games it was assumed would go on to challenge Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom for the title of game of the year. Baldur’s Gate 3 is certainly in the running, with only one single review in the whole world giving it any less than 8/10 (and that one seemed to be weirdly caught up about it not being the same as the old 90s games).

So far, it’s got over 100 reviews on PC but only a dozen or so on PlayStation 5, as that only came out on Wednesday and it doesn’t seem as if copies arrived soon enough to get reviews done for launch day. There seems to be a lot of that going on at the moment, with Starfield only having 70 reviews on Xbox, which, as you can see from Baldur’s Gate 3, means a lot of people haven’t yet review it.

We all know why that is, with Bethesda refusing to send early copies to those sites they thought would mark it lower (i.e. those ones that were least susceptible to hype, so kudos to GC for being included in that group, along with Eurogamer and Edge). Now it’s out for everyone and on Game Pass, so we can all get to try it for nothing beyond a Game Pass sub. So what do I think…? I think I’ve never been more bored and less surprised by a game.

There’s obviously going to be a lot of debate over this game, not only from Xbox fans desperate for a win but Bethesda fans still clinging on to that Skyrim nostalgia. And I get it, at least the second one. I’m a Star Wars fan, so I know a thing or too about being manipulated by nostalgia and getting frustrated that a franchise just won’t move on from its past.

It wasn’t a surprise to me that Starfield is basically just a reskinned version of Skyrim, with everything but the combat being basically exactly the same. The graphics are better than Fallout 4 but still not amazing and the dialogue and AI don’t seem to have changed one bit. I played it for about 10 hours and the thing that struck me was how it felt like all the space stuff had been shoehorned into it at the last minute.

It was like it was supposed to be a normal open world game, like Skyrim, then they suddenly decided to make it in space and so the spaceship combat and travel ends up feeling like window dressing. None of it adds anything substantial and it could easily be taken out, and some other story come up with, and it would make very little difference.

But not even that is my biggest complaint. The biggest issue, and the one thing I didn’t expect, is just how boring the game is. The first couple of hours are horribly confusing and frustrating. I don’t know how they could possibly have though not having a map was a good idea but it makes travelling around the first two cities an absolute nightmare, especially with the constant loading pauses.

Then, when you get into the missions, everything is the same. Go to this planet, go into a cave and pick up a bit of metal. Then take it back to The Lodge and do the whole thing again. I don’t know how long that is going to go on for but that’s almost the only main mission type I saw in all the time I played.

Naturally, I gave the side quests a go as well and what excitement was to be had there? Well, the first one involved wandering around the first city, without a map, turning fuse boxes on and off. High octane thrills in that one, I can tell you.

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The others all just seemed to be variants of ‘go to this planet and kill everyone you meet.’ Which gets old about 10 minutes in because the gunplay is so mediocre. I gave up more in surprise than disgust, at just how bad it all was.

I’m sure I’m about to be told that actually I had to play it for 100 hours to understand the true majesty of the game, but no. Not only do I not believe it gets substantially better but if a game can’t grab me within 10 hours, then it’s not a good game. That’s enough time to watch four or five movies or a whole TV series.

It’s obvious to me now, what Bethesda was trying to hide, and shame on those sites that gave this 5/5 or 10/10 scores. If you like the game then fine, I can respect that, but nobody should be pretending this isn’t a deeply flawed and, in my opinion, deeply boring, video game.

By reader Futterman

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A reader tries out Starfield on Game Pass and is disappointed by its repetition and lack of advancement over Skyrim and Fallout 4.