Too much in all the wrong places: Starfield First impressions

Intro:  After thirty years of no new IP from Bethesda, Starfield comes on the scene, bold and unafraid.  After playing five chapters and am at the tail end of the 6th one, I can see what this game was trying to do but it fell short, trying to bite off more than it could chew. A massive world of space exploration, ship designing, space pirates, side quests and artifacts to collects. With all of this and a world that is massive all on its own it felt like there was so much missing form the story, maybe it’s because I’m only sixth chapter, but being 13 hours in and a story barely present I have more questions than answers.

An Overwhelming Emptiness:  First going into Starfield it was an exciting experience that I dove into headfirst expecting to be greeted with an enticing story but after playing for 13 hours felt bored and was more impressed with the graphics and other aspects of the game than the substance of the quests themselves. There was this overwhelming emptiness I felt during my playtime of Starfield. Not emptiness in the gameplay or the exploration, but the story and substance of why I was playing the game.  The delivery of the story and how it connected to everything in the game was vague and left open for interpretation which is normally good if there is some structure behind it to back the “vagueness” up by the end of the game,  but with Starfield, there was no spine for the first almost 20 hours of the game to stand on. The Beauty of Space:  There’s an unshakable beauty of Starfield that made me go “oh” in the best way possible, more times than one. This game is stunning in its presentation, and music composition. Seeing the vastness and stars above captured the endlessness of space is probably how eternity must feel. Fighting space pirates, strange organisms, and finding artifacts was intriguing in its own way and utilized unique areas that ranged from desert wastelands to cyberpunk creations.  This game nailed the aesthetics and feel of a vastness that consumes the player.

Fallout In Space: Throughout playing Starfield I felt like I was I was back in Fallout, incredible NPC’s, weird death animations and a broad landscape to explore. Starfield being made with the Creation Engine 2, (the same engine that created Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and the Elder Scrolls V) was a bit confusing to me, I would have assumed that they would have created this game on a different engine. Did the developers want to preserve the aesthetic from previous games? Needless to say, I have a lot of questions.  Even the death animations, the mechanics, the style of the story, (open yet linear) and the dialogue, it’s all very reminiscent from Fallout. If Fallout is a game you love then this a game that you will fall in love with immensely.  The dialogue of the game is very specific to what makes Fallout, Fallout.  Once a game has a style then it’s up to the player to decide if that style fits their playstyle and if it’s a game they want to invest their time in. I am someone who has an already iffy history with Fallout games, New Vegas being the only one I really enjoyed.  The mechanics had their ups and downs, with a FPS stutters here and there. There were also things you had to do in the game with digipicks in order to progress in the game, which I was not a fan of at all. Not only that but let’s say you get an enemy really mad at you, on purpose or by accident, there was no escaping them, each time you go back to an area be it one that you need to go back to or a random one, they will still be mad, holding an eternal grudge. This makes exploring and going about main missions irritating to say the least.  This game has all the things of a fallout game I don’t like and all the things of a new IP that has really struck me as creative and interesting.  I’m not sure if I will go back to complete Starfield, there isn’t anything that is really pulling me to continue it, and that’s unfortunate. But its also ok, because at the end of the day not every game will be meant for every person.  Starfield created a world where, for me, it felt overwhelming, at times empty and did not grab me in the way I had hoped.