BohdanQQ

Prepare for a review-ish timeline of my Starfield 125h playthrough. Spoiler-free TL;DR at the bottom of the page.

Remember, I was apologetic for a long time in favor of this game yet it still comes out as...

the first and the last game I will ever preorder and the last game I purchased from Bethesda. The definition of overhype and corporate greed. The epitome of a Scam with shiny looks.

Starfield.

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Intro

As soon as Starfield got announced back then and I found out while sitting in a lecture hall, I was thrilled. I set my profile picture to the Constellation logo and wondered how this game was going to make a breakthrough in the profoundly-sounding space exploration as introduced in the trailer. Let's also not forget the all-new spacefighting mechanisms introduced in later trailers for which I was extremely excited.

Logically, when the game was about to come out, I preordered. I was sold on the NASA-punk style Starfield pushed so much, I purchased the Starfield edition Xbox controller. I still believe that the design style of Starfields's UIs visible throughout the game and beyond are the most innovative and attractive things about the game. (excluding the default-ish Creation Engine's UIs... those are repetitive and awful to use)

But do not let those words of praise fool you. The fact that a bunch of neatly designed screens and controls using rough edges and simple colors are "it" for me when it comes to this game only masks the dark and painful picture that the main product, the game itself, has yet to paint...

Release period

I was hyped. People I followed rated Starfield as one of the best games they ever played. Both visually and gameplay-wise. The amount of "handy" tricks they shared has made my heart race a bit. I was looking forward to playing this game.

I was immediately caught in the story. Mysterious objects, the almost-magical projections implying deeper meaning, and all the "new-game-y" feelings and thrills. I needed to turn the graphics down given my GPU (NVidia 3060 6GB 135W (125? not sure) laptop GPU) only has 6GB of VRAM, but whatever. I was not even reaching stable 45FPS, but you know... whatever. The graphics looked... extremely bad but... whatever...

Do you see where this is going?

DLSS?

The first thing that struck me as odd was the lack of DLSS support. I have no idea whether AMD struck a deal with Bethesda or Bethesda just wanted to embrace the open upscaling solution contrary to NVidia's proprietary product (which NVidia uses as an incentive to upgrade users' hardware semi-forcefully). Either way, they went with the inferior upscaling technology.

At the time of Starfield's release, the launch of a single game (CP77 for example) would show FSR was struggling behind DLSS on my GPU. I recognized many more artifacts and lower FPS with FSR. One of the first things I did was enable DLSS by downloading a dll of a mod, which replaced FSR with DLSS. Suddenly, my FPS had gotten better... until...

Opening Menus

Strangely, from what feels like almost half the time, when I opened a menu, there was a chance that upon exiting that menu (could be inventory, map, even the main menu), the game and the menus themselves would be incredibly sluggish. By sluggish I mean 5-20 FPS when my framerate would otherwise reach 50s. This could sometimes be resolved by either opening a menu again and waiting for a bit, traveling to a different location, or... just restarting the game. Keep this little detail in mind for it will come up in the upcoming paragraphs...

Performance and other defects

Apart from the already serious list of defects, I respected the release-time crashes (which were NOT traceable to the DLSS mod as far as my experiments have shown), the inability to set the field of view (FOV), and weird interactions with NPCs. Such as NPCs holding weird objects in weird positions... For a few months...

Loading screens, old engine

The last of my technical sections in this subsection concerns loading screens and the seemingly outdated technology behind the game.

NOTE: I categorize some animations as loading screens. That includes the pilot seat animations, station docking, ship docking, and landing/takeoff/grav jump sequences.

Loading screens are everywhere*.

*Except for planetary exploration within a single chunk.

These loading screens become a significant part of your journey once you explore most core systems where the most important NPCs are located. The docking animations also become extremely annoying later, when your eye gets saturated with all the details of the docking hatch. What I would expect from a reasonably modern game is loading the spaceship/station subject to docking during the docking animation. Heck, the game requires an SSD to run! I found it almost embarrassing to have to go through a few seconds of loading AFTER I endured 5 seconds of a docking animation. And such mishaps were all over the place in the entire game, from the top of my head, landing animation becomes yet another example of this (seemingly) unreasonable limitation.

Another, albeit minor, thing is the game's optimization when objects are out of the player's FOV. When moving the camera too quickly, one could notice the cloth materials move despite being completely stationary, almost as if the air was moving with the camera.

All the while the game feels... old. You can see Skyrim (I have not played Fallout) all over the place. In the shop menus, inventory, quest layouts, everywhere. The performance options do not help this feeling and the game looks old even texture-wise if you do not have (what I assume is) top-of-the-line hardware.

Do not get me wrong. I turned up the textures and switched to native scaling for (I hope) most of my "wallpaper-tier" screenshots but sometimes, while playing, the textures were just rough to look at... And this is coming from a person who played Borderlands 1 on his toaster PC on the lowest details to get 60FPS. I think my "texture quality tolerance" is quite high...

I gathered this info just within the very first one or two months of playing. The game was just a mess. Funnily enough, I ignored the technical and the upcoming gameplay hurdles for so long that I got used to them! Only a retrospective look has allowed me to assess the game with some clarity.  

Lack of gameplay

Gameplay-wise, I went after the main quest line. Interestingly enough, the recommended level for the main story missions (derived from the star system level where an artifact was to be found, the main quest POI was located, etc.) has been higher than what you could accumulate from the story missions alone. This might force a lot of players into exploring the other parts of the gameplay.

So about that...

I am not going to lie. The game's introduction to the universe and the mechanics it exposes were poor. I found myself looking stuff up whenever I tried something different than exploring planets, completing side quests, or shooting enemies at POIs. A prime example is the concept of contraband. Sure, the game does explain you can install cargo modules that have the chance to avoid detection. Nobody tells you, though, that Trade Authority, and especially Trade Authority on The Den space station in the Wolf system, is just about the only place you can sell contraband without getting caught. On my own, I would have probably never discovered this because I would have given up before doing the (wasteful) extensive research (for a stupid video game, that is).

Many other mechanics seemed boring and I had not yet explored them all (at the release period). What struck me as extremely weird was the progression system. It felt slow and random. Both skill point assignment and "research". Skill assignment has become a "chore to make my ships at least a bit useful" and "research" became "the activity you perform whenever you see the research station: click all the buttons, spend all your resources because they are not really scarce anyway".

Also, throughout the game, the enemy AI was too easy to defeat. Sometimes they barely fired shots, just standing idle or aiming at the ground. Combined with the vastness and emptiness of the game, it felt like the ultimate pointless time killer, designed for people with tons of free time where you could become anyone. Anyone feeling like Mr. Nobody the whole time...

Screenshots of early bugs

NPC holding a case as if it was something different. 8th Sep 2023

Ground creatures levitating. 18th September 2023

"Blind glitch" - a recurrence for the first few months. This could be blamed on the DLSS mod I had installed! 19th September 2023

Forever-glitched position of the player when he leaves a ship equipped with some low-hanging modules in front of the platform (ship ground exit). 25th September 2023

30-100 hrs of gameplay

Subsystems

As I discovered more and more features the game had to offer, I collected a few observations. Some things are (as said above) flat-out unexplained or explained poorly. That means I was either forced to use the Internet while playing or I had to read an in-game guide. For some mechanics and features, this was okay, for some this was suboptimal at best.

Afflictions

One example is the Afflictions system. It is only a minor annoyance if you are careful about where you put your feet, on the other hand, the UI indications of both the player status and the remedies for afflictions could be more visible because... why do I need to see a huge plain almost monochrome plastic bag and a tiny description of what the item is good for...

Contraband... again with a tiny more knowledge

Another thing was the contraband smuggling system. I have never needed to install cargo protection modules as I never collected contraband (I am, however, sad about not doing so after seeing a Reddit post showcasing such a collection). All you have to do to get rid of it (while gaining some credits as well) is to go to The Den station in the Wolf system. Additionally, from what I have gathered, the cargo smuggling modules provide a probabilistic result. They may work, but they also may not. This further diminished the incentives to try to smuggle anything, though this is a purely personal preference, I can see a lot of players enjoying this stuff.

Outposts with a touch of character-building

Another subsystem I discovered, and this time spent a whole lot of time with, is the outpost-building system. For some reason, I wanted to manufacture as much as I could and connect all of my various mining outposts to provide materials into a single mega-outpost where everything would be pipelined correctly. A smaller-scale Factorio factory. The limitations of the system though (particularly the dimensions of a single outpost and the limitation on the number of cargo links) greatly slowed down my progress when I got to build my first pipeline of more advanced components. Thus, I converted one of my outposts to a simple storage outpost and an experimental outpost for trying out outpost modules... and never used this system again.

This brings me to another thing... Perk tree leveling stupidity. There is no other way to call this and I am not willing to describe this much. Simply put, some of the leveling of the perk tree items is exploitable, exploitable beyond crazy. With outpost and ship modules, there is a requirement to build X, Y, and Z unique modules. Nothing prevents you from a free-of-charge build-remove cycle, each time building something different. Yea. The "decade-in-the-making". Lol.

Official DLSS Support

Thanks. Thanks for including and fully supporting a feature that should have been shipped with the base game. Thank you. Thank you for providing a technology that makes your game playable or bearable. Sigh.

The vast emptiness and "quests"

By the time I had more hours in the game, I noticed, that I spent my time doing absolute bullcrap. And by that, I even mean the missions themselves which got repetitive and were only a means to have the opportunity to discover some new locations honestly. The game is empty. Not sure whether this is by design but either way: If you are someone who just wants to turn their brain off after a day at work or if you just experience a sudden loss of appetite towards entertainment in general and are looking for an equivalent of those plain dried rice cakes when it comes to gaming, you are perfectly fine with choosing this game. You will not run out of this ... "entertainment" regardless of your session length.

The main quest line is abysmal. Period. The side quests are the actual story bringing you closer to a faction/a person/a group/a company. Most of the time, the quests are repetitive: bring this, kill that, press "E" on these N objects...

What I would recommend would be:

1. the UC Sysdef questline where you infiltrate the Crimson Fleet to discover Kryx's Legacy and the Terrormorph origin discovery you make when looking for a cause of their sudden resurgence among the stars
2. the Ryujin Industries line
3. a questline regarding long-lost, almost ancient, settlers from Earth who arrive at a paradise planet that is already occupied by people born long after those ancients embarked on their journey
4. a questline where you will discover the fate of Mantis

Some of those missions hit the spot. Only a few, however, make you feel something - awe, anger, utter confusion, or some feeling of a profound discovery about one of the leading factions of the Settled Systems... Do not expect miracles, just glimpses of what this game could have been.

Still broken, even before the May update + screenshots

Yep. After gigabytes of updates the game at least stopped crashing. Random lag periods, unexplainable phenomena and lackluster feelings still in place.

There was even a time when the game's UI locked me out of control mid-mission while interacting with a research station. I had to force-quit the game and reload a save which has cost me tens of minutes of gameplay.

I started running out of patience but kept launching the game now and then as my brain got used to the emptiness and artificial feeling the world induced in me. Here are some more bug-full screenshots:

First, levitation, again... Barret showed off on 14th March 2024 (this location is an Aurora goldmine IIRC):

(This image was captured as a facepalm-moment for my BeReal memory and exported sometime in late July 2024 using my BeReal export tool)

Then, a control console took a part in this recurring display on 24th March 2024:

Other NPCs tried not to be ashamed of the above. Walking around without a spacesuit despite the extreme temperature on 10th April 2024:

After the May update

May update was the first real "reconnection" with the state of affairs Bethesda made. This update has brought a lot of QoL features, most of which were supposed to be in the base game from the beginning... Prime example: surface map... It used to look almost empty apart from circular badges of POIs (it actually displayed a dotted net of points that very vaguely hinted at the elevation level). There was zero similarity to the outside world, a plain blue sea of nothing. Suddenly, though, we received an ACTUAL MAP with some sort of view of the area we actually landed in.

The update has brought some optimizations! I fiddled with the controls to bump my graphics settings a bit only to discover that DLSS was causing my "lag periods" so I had to switch to FSR to finally feel somewhat immersed.

There were some promises for upcoming features but overall, the game has seen little improvement in my opinion. Sure, you could now access more settings but... and I am going to repeat myself, this should have been included from day one. NPCs are still incredibly dumb and I am giving up every sign of hope for this game.

Starbug Guardimess + screenshots

One of the nails in the coffin was my incident when I stole a Starborn Guardian ship. I have not finished the game yet and I should not have been able to board the ship, but I was. I stood inside the ship, recalling the main mission where you actually have the opportunity to board such a ship. I entered the pilot seat and gave it a test drive. I could fly the ship in orbit, use weapons, and see the interior from the first-person view, everything seemed to be in order.

Then I landed, without grav-jumping. The ship sunk halfway into the ground, and stayed in its "flying" mode. Seemingly, the entrance was placed inside the ship's center now. And this is where the fun begins... The timestamp of all screenshots is 22nd May 2024.

I was able to interact with a ship technician on Mars (where I got the ship), I think he was near the landing zone. He was programmed to say something along the lines of: "Weird ship you got there! I have no idea what to do with it.". He sounded puzzled.

As the entrance pointer was inside the ship's center, and the ship was halfway under the ground, I could not enter the ship. Reloading the game, and entering an area nearby, nothing helped. I could teleport inside the ship via fast travel. This provided me with this spectacular view. Glitched textures with preserved geometry and physics. Only the curves of the outer edges were discernible. The pilot seat was ready to be interacted with.

From that point, I was unable to control the ship. I was locked into the pilot seat. After a game reload, this view has welcomed me:

This seems to be a no-texture, low-quality map chunk loaded without any effects and lightning. There was no UI, nothing. I was able to grav jump via fast travel. which is what I did.

The ship landed, the planet loaded normally, and the camera still quite zoomed out. Everything is in order, right? Nope. The ship is invisible and for some reason, the camera was fully rotationally unlocked! There was no limit to how much I could spin it in one direction! Upside-down views follow:

I tried to get up from the pilot seat successfully only to be welcomed to a fully transparent ship! Sadly, I do not have a screenshot of this... you could certainly imagine the pain, navigating from a faint memory of the ship layout. I got out and was welcomed with... everything the game ever meant to me:

As you can read and as you can see: nothing. I haven't even left the ship according to the UI! What the hell? There was a planet just a moment ago! Looking at the star map, we can see we glitched ourselves out (more exactly to the upper left corner :) ) of the map:

The last drop & the June update

Remember levitation?

Even before the June update, I decided to finally make use of my "First-class citizen" (lol) New Atlantis flat. I put a few decorations and collected plushies (Wilbys, etc.) around, put my antique weapons on display, and moved on to showcasing my Freestar ranger, Project Mercury-themed suit and more. For this, I utilized the classic mannequin, your TES: V friend.

After relaunching the game several days later to move the rest of my suits, I was terrified. My suits were gone. The mannequins disappeared. According to several reddit posts, this was more than a 10-month old bug and the stuff was not gone, just levitating somewhere else. 10 MONTHS! Knowing my stuff was safe, albeit partially lost, I quit the game for the rest of May. This was the last drop.

June update

At this point, I was unwilling to spend the energy giving this game "a second chance" for what felt like a tenth time already. Bethesda introduced paid mods, again. For a digital premium game, you get 1EUR/USD worth of credits. If you pre-ordered and endured this piece of junk for so long, you get nothing. And if you would argue that the mods might be cheap, please sit down for what is about to come. A single 20-minute mission, officially sold by Bethesda, costs... 700 credits, which equates to 7 EUR. I lost all respect I had left. Corporate greed and a scam at the same time. Starfield.

Heck, they even screwed up this release because despite not ordering the Premium edition, I got a dialog telling me I get 100 credits for free (only to discover my balance was 0). How ironic!

Do you remember the lag periods I had with DLSS? Yes! They returned! EVEN WITH FSR! Many thanks, kind game "developer".

Levitation perseveres

So I tried the game one last time, retrieved my items from mannequins (which, by the way, were stacked inside of one another, making the retrieval without cheat commands that much harder...), and... saw levitating New Atlantean trees in the distance almost as if they were shifted on the horizontal plane the same way the mannequins were. This game is a joke. 10th June 2024:

Afterthought (DLC)

House Va'ruun will finally get an arc. Though much more fantasy-like than the rest of the game it seems. Modders seem to be making a game out of this piece of junk. The versatility of the Creation Toolkit is just about the only technological thing this game has going for it. And it is not even something new.

This entire writeup turned out to be quite depressive as it progressed and I realized what an awful choice I made both with my time and my money. Next time Bethesda releases a game I think I would enjoy, I will donate the money to charity and feel better than those poor souls who "think" Starfield is or ever was worth it without the mods. The merch looks great though...

I wish this game got as much hate and humiliation as early Cyberpunk had gotten because this is such a bad and distasteful game and the main thing is: Bethesda is not going to improve the game, the modders are... for free. And Bethesda keeps getting away with it....

Some fun at the end

I do not wish to end this writing with such a negative tone. Here are some "funny"/interesting things I encountered while playing this game:

An indication of a dramatic disagreement between the Ecliptic I encountered at a POI. Charles Darwin's ideas are literally provocative even hundreds of years into the future (this scene was not staged, it was generated that way):

"Out of ice":

Pilsner on a zero-G party ship. The ship arrived and invited me into the early stages of my gameplay. Certainly a fun experience, though they never appeared again...

Other tiny joys and some "artistic" screenshots

One notable mention is the ruin of The Shard building in London that appears on the Earth after a while. It certainly was a nice thing and I hoped there would be more. Sadly, that is not the case (at least for me).

One of the first screenshots and "camera play" follows. I landed on this planet which had mesmerizing properties in terms of its "sky":

I really gave the game so many chances...

And a big leap (yes, you can find my spacesuit somewhere in the pic!):

Now my collection of "wallpaper-tier" photos:

Some random cave with glowing fungus:

Dark blue crystals on the surface of a planet:

A POI which I don't remember how it is called:

The Armistice Archives, thanks for the shoulder, Barret...

A crystal cave inside what I believe was an asteroid:

Some random night sky:

Temple tau:

One of my first encounters with the Starborn Guardian:

More camera plays and posing:

More ancient ruins:

The discovery of a crater:

Atop ruins with Sarah:

Inside a temple:

Gaining power:

Colorful crystals on the surface of a planet:

TL;DR

Pros

• Soul-less game with little feeling and choices if all you want is to aimlessly travel through the universe
• (at least) 2 really good questlines (not the main questline!)
• No-Man's-Sky-like exploration
• Base building with great degrees of freedom
• Plurality of the faction choices which DO NOT exclude one another
• The mods will hopefully save the game in the long run

Cons/Embarrasments

• Performance all over the place, any part of the year
• DLSS (and even FSR) strangely lags my game even more
• Enemy AI is terrible
• Outdated looks (you can really tell this game is an entire generation - if not more - behind)
• Slowness of updates, especially reasonable and much-needed QoL updates
• Paid (mostly 1st party) mods
• Glitches affecting already collected and stored loot
• Glitches affecting the playability as a whole -> frequent saving is welcome
• Incredible amount of loading screens and "animation" overbloat
• Main questline sucks
• Role-playing aspect experienced primarily via dialogs
• By purchasing from Bethesda, you support mediocrity, overpromising, underdelivering and scams

Links

My Steam review

Most screenshots are available on Steam

Some of the original files cannot be found on Steam, those and others in their original resolution are here (92.7 MB).

Pictures also available on Steam:

[1] - NPC holding suitcase in a weird way - 1

[2] - NPC holding suitcase in a weird way - 2

[3] - Floating ground creatures

[4] - Blindness 1

[5] - Blindness 2

[6] - Blindness 3

[7] - Head inside a ship - 3rd person

[8] - Head inside a ship - 1st person

[9] - Levitating Barret 1

[10] - Levitating Barret 2

[11] - Levitating Console

[12] - Suitless NPCs

[13] - Starborn guardian Burried

[14] -  Glitched Starborn guardian - interior

[15] -  Glitched Starborn guardian - pilot seat after reload

[16] -  Glitched Starborn guardian - unlocked camera rotation 1

[17] -  Glitched Starborn guardian - unlocked camera rotation 2

[18] -  Glitched Starborn guardian - after exiting

[19] -  Glitched Starborn guardian - after exiting, outside the map

[20] -  The mannequins

[21] -  Floating trees in the distance

[22] -  Darwin

[23] -  Out of ice

[24] -  Party ship

[25] -  Mesmerizing rings

[26] -  Mesmerizing rings 2

[27] -  Into the Starfield - original

[28] -  Into the Starfield

[29] -  Big leap

[30] -  Temple Tau

[31] -  Starborn guardian

[32] -  Reaching out

[33] -  Ancient ruins

[34] -  Crater

[35] -  Atop ruins

[36] -  Inside a temple

[37] -  Gaining power

[38] -  Colorful crystals

[39] - Levitating Barret 3

Last update

2nd August 2024