I’ve been a pretty big supporter of Xbox Game Pass (and PC Game Pass) since the service launched a few years ago, and I’ve been a subscriber to the PC version from almost the first moment it became available. I love the idea: a huge library of games, all available for one monthly price. As someone on a low income (and as someone who remembers what it was like to be a kid with only a few pennies to spend on gaming), Game Pass has been genuinely great value; an easy route into current-gen gaming for players on a budget.
What’s more, I’ve discovered games that I’d never have thought to buy or try for myself, thanks entirely to Game Pass. Some of those games – like Little Kitty, Big City last year and South of Midnight just a couple of months ago – are genuinely among the best titles I’ve played in the 2020s, and it’s only because of Game Pass that I was able to try them and enjoy them.
But unless Microsoft changes course, it’s time to cancel Game Pass.
It’s time to cancel Game Pass, unfortunately.
I play on PC, not console. The PC version of Game Pass, just over a year ago, went up in price from £7.99 here in the UK to £9.99 – a hike of 25%. That already felt a bit steep, but since I don’t have many other subscriptions, I begrudgingly accepted it. £10 a month still felt like reasonably good value for what I was getting from Game Pass; play two full-priced games a year, or four £30, double-A games, and it’s paid for itself. Right?
If you weren’t already aware, Microsoft has come back, not twelve months after the last price hike, and they’re doing it again. The PC version of Game Pass is rising from £9.99 to £13.49: a 35% increase on top of last year’s 25% increase. And that isn’t even the worst or most egregious price rise: the “Ultimate” Game Pass plan is rising by more than 50%, from £14.99 to a whopping £22.99 a month. At these prices… Game Pass no longer feels like a good value offer, unfortunately.
Game Pass prices are rising… by a lot.
And I really do say this with regret. Not only has Game Pass felt like a good value prospect until now, but it’s introduced me to some genuinely wonderful gaming experiences that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Being able to log into the app, scroll through a huge list of titles, and see what leaps out at me has felt fantastic, and as I’ve said more than once: Game Pass has opened up a huge library of titles; more games than I’d ever be able to afford. When it was £7.99 – and even after last year’s significant rise to £9.99 – it felt like a good deal.
But I can’t accept the price of a single subscription rising by almost 70% in just thirteen months. And at £13.49 a month – or £162 a year – it’s become impossible to justify. There just aren’t that many games on the service that I’d want to play – and some, like RoadCraft, aren’t available on the PC version of Game Pass, for some reason. So… I think I’m done with Game Pass for now, unless Microsoft apologises and reverses this price hike.
How Microsoft imagines its customers…
I’ve believed for a long time that the subscription model would be the future of gaming. Just like Netflix did for films and TV programmes, and Spotify and others have done for music, something like Game Pass should be able to do for video games. Gaming is basically all-digital these days anyway, and the audience skews younger and more tech-savvy. A reasonably-priced subscription service – like Game Pass used to be – represents a genuinely good value proposition, an easy route into gaming, and should be the wave of the future. Compared to buying individual titles outright, either physically or digitally, a subscription which opens up a library of hundreds of titles should seem like good value.
But Microsoft is fucking it up.
Not only are the prices going up, but on the lower “tiers,” Microsoft is making Game Pass worse. No longer will all Xbox-published games join the service on day one. If you’re on an Xbox console, the only way you’ll get that particular perk is if you pay for Game Pass Ultimate, and if you’re on PC, the only way to get it is through the PC-only tier, for £13.49 a month. If you pay less, you don’t get those brand-new titles on day one, but “within a year.” That’s already a massive downgrade. Oh, and the venerable Call of Duty series? Those games aren’t included on day one any more.
That little asterisk could be important if you’re a lover of first-person shooters…
So… the price is going up. Unless you pay for the top-tier plan, you won’t get new games on day one. And the most popular series that Microsoft currently owns may not be part of Game Pass on day one even if you do pay the premium price. So… what’s the point of Game Pass, then?
Microsoft, like all big corporations, has to disclose its financial records. And in the twelve months leading up to June 2025 (the most recent data at time of writing), Microsoft made US$193 billion in profit. That represented a 14% increase over the previous twelve months. Compared with quite a few other big companies in the gaming space, whose profits have been relatively static since the end of lockdown, Microsoft has been doing phenomenally well. And the Xbox brand is a big part of that.
Microsoft has literally never been more profitable. Slides: Microsoft’s July 2025 Earnings Call.
Microsoft made more money last year than it has ever made before in its entire corporate existence. For the corporation to then turn around and announce price hikes of 50% – or, really, what is effectively 70% on PC – is just sickening. It’s beyond greedy, and even if a thousand new games were being added to the Game Pass library… it still wouldn’t be right. But Game Pass, as far as I can tell, is not actually getting a major expansion or much additional content that could even come close to justifying a price hike of this nature.
So… I’m gonna cancel. And I would encourage other folks in the same boat as me to do the same.
If Microsoft is willing to walk this back – and apologise – then maybe I’ll reconsider, because I have genuinely enjoyed having Game Pass over the last few years. But at this new price, it’s not worth it for me, and I could use my £162 a year in other ways – like buying games when they go on sale on Steam or Epic Games, for instance. I really did think that subscriptions are the direction of travel for gaming… but not like this.
A selection of Game Pass titles.
This is a catastrophic own goal from Microsoft that the corporation simply did not need to make. Game Pass has been profitable for a while, and even as the Xbox brand has struggled over the last couple of console generations, the growth in PC gaming, coupled with Game Pass, has seen Microsoft’s gaming division land on its feet. But increasing the price of a subscription by 70% in thirteen months is not something any consumer can or should accept – not when the corporation behind the price hike is making hundreds of billions of dollars a year – and still laying off boatloads of workers and closing game studios.
Maybe Microsoft wants to get out of the gaming market, and these moves are designed to push people away. Or maybe they really think they can just get away with it and that folks will brush off these inexplicably large price hikes. Maybe some people will – but if it’s true, as has been reported, that so many people are rushing to cancel their subscriptions that the Game Pass website crashed… I suspect a re-think of this price structure may be in order.
In any case, I’m cancelling this month, and unless Microsoft apologises and changes course, I won’t be rejoining Game Pass any time soon. I’m genuinely disappointed about that, because the subscription has been great until now (even though the Xbox app on PC isn’t spectacular). But this price hike is too much, so I’m going to do the only thing I can do as a consumer in this marketplace: vote with my wallet.
The Game Pass subscription service is available now for players on PC and Xbox game consoles. All titles discussed above are the copyright of their respective developer, publisher, and/or studio. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
The first part of this review is free from major spoilers. The end of the spoiler-free section is clearly marked.
I’m late to the party with yet another review! South of Midnight was released back in April, but it somehow eluded me for a while. I noticed it on Game Pass – I’m a subscriber to the PC version – and I thought I’d give it a try based on little more than its art style. And you know what? I’m so glad I did!
South of Midnight is a great advertisement for Game Pass as a concept. This is a game I wouldn’t have bought for myself – and I might never have come to hear about – were it not included as part of the subscription. It’s entirely because of Game Pass that I’ve gotten to enjoy one of the best gaming experiences of 2025 so far; a genuine contender for my highly-coveted “game of the year” award. I continue to believe that Game Pass is a fantastic idea, especially for folks like myself on lower incomes where budgets are tight. And South of Midnight is the latest – and one of the best – examples of a game I discovered thanks to the platform that I wouldn’t have come across otherwise.
But enough about that – this isn’t meant to be a review of Game Pass.
I really enjoyed South of Midnight.
South of Midnight is an absolute delight. Its unique art style – which draws inspiration from cartoons of yesteryear and stop-motion films from the likes of Tim Burton – belies a dark Southern Gothic narrative, full of twists, complex characters, and nightmarish monsters. An engaging, relatable protagonist keeps the entire experience grounded, with a simple, understandable quest – even as things get progressively weirder! There are some incredible voice acting performances bringing a wonderfully diverse cast of characters to life, and a beautiful soundtrack that really leans into the music of the Southern United States and New Orleans in particular.
I found the game’s combat to be tough but fair – even though I had to turn down the difficulty at one point – and there’s enough enemy variety to keep things interesting. Boss battles are outstanding, too, with each boss having something unique to pose a new challenge. And the game rewarded exploring its beautiful and haunting levels with collectibles, points for levelling-up, and things to read which expanded the story and the lore. I had an incredibly fun time with South of Midnight, and it’s a game I’m happy to recommend to any fan of single-player adventure titles, narrative adventures, and really just gaming in general! If you have Game Pass already it’s an absolute no-brainer.
I think I’ve said all I can without touching on the story, so if you haven’t played South of Midnight yet, be aware that there will be some narrative spoilers from here on out.
This is the end of the spoiler-free section. Expect narrative spoilers for South of Midnight from this point.
In 2021, I named Kena: Bridge of Spirits my “game of the year.” And South of Midnight is giving me major Kena vibes in terms of how it plays, how its story is structured, and even the whole “healing the world” or “helping lost spirits” ideas that both games use. I absolutely mean that as a compliment; Kena: Bridge of Spirits is one of the best games of the last few years for me, so any title that can tap into that style or feel in any way reminiscent of it is doing a lot of things right!
3D platforming is something we don’t see enough of nowadays – and I really appreciated this aspect of South of Midnight. It’s a ton of fun to run, jump, climb, and swing through some truly beautiful levels, and there was a distinctively “old-school” feel to some of the game’s 3D platforming. At the same time, protagonist Hazel’s magical powers gave her a variety of ways to navigate these environments. Things like gliding, “rope” swinging, and double-jumping aren’t new by any means, but the way Hazel acquired these abilities felt unique and in keeping with the game’s story.
Hazel jumping onto a temporary platform.
As I indicated above, combat was challenging enough that I had to turn down the difficulty from normal to easy – but I’m usually an easy mode player, so that wasn’t a huge surprise. I liked how South of Midnight keeps combat encounters and exploration separate; combat arenas are pretty clearly marked, so you can’t just stumble into combat totally unprepared. One thing I thought was a bit silly, though, is that health never regenerated out of combat – if you were injured (or you had to respawn, losing a chunk of health in the process) there aren’t any healing potions or items. That meant the only way to heal was to locate a healing coil – which are only found in combat arenas.
The haints – South of Midnight’s enemies – were pretty varied and fun in terms of how they behaved. You got your usual ranged enemy, a couple of different brute variants, a healer, and a couple of others. With combat being quite fast-paced, and every enemy being a similar colour, maybe a little more visual variety wouldn’t have gone amiss! But that’s my only real criticism of the enemies; I liked the way they played.
A combat encounter.
Boss battles were fun – though a couple of them felt just a tad repetitive. This wasn’t because one boss felt the same as another, but rather within a couple of the boss battles – Two-Toed Tom the alligator and Kooshma, the final boss – the boss’ pattern would repeat. You’d be knocked down, you’d have to chase them or return to the arena, then after beating the next part of their health meter, you’d have to do it all over again. It wasn’t annoying per se, but it was a little repetitive to the point where I felt a couple of those boss battles were just a little padded. Either some changes could’ve been made to the way the bosses behaved, or maybe they could’ve been cut down from three rounds to two!
Each boss was, though, completely distinctive both visually and in terms of their battle arena, which was great. And mechanically, there were different ways to fight different bosses – like throwing bottles at Molly, or ringing the bell for Two-Toed Tom – rather than just repeating the same hit-hit-dodge pattern that some action games can fall into.
One of the boss battles.
I felt echoes of Hurricane Katrina in South of Midnight’s opening act. A hurricane coming in, sweeping away homes, floodwaters rising… I know there have been other hurricanes to hit the region both before and since Katrina, but the game’s story, with its Deep South setting, some jazz in the soundtrack, and references to New Orleans, definitely made me think of Katrina before any other hurricanes.
Many of the monsters and creatures in the game are inspired by real-world legends from the Mississippi Delta, Louisiana and the surrounding Southern region. The game weaved these into its narrative, building a world and lore based on the Southern United States – but with a dark twist. Often called “Southern Gothic,” this style of storytelling blends Gothic horror with Southern ideas, characters, and themes – and it’s been a popular subgenre for a while. South of Midnight is the first video game I’ve played to lean into the genre in such an overt and profound way, though.
Hazel in a New Orleans-inspired town near the end of the game.
Hazel made for a great protagonist. With so many hares and rabbits running around, though, I can’t be the only one who thought of Watership Down… can I? Gosh, that film is burned into my mind! To get back on topic, Hazel was a wonderfully relatable protagonist, and her core storyline of wanting to find her mother – her sole surviving parent – after the hurricane was intense and emotional. Hazel could occasionally chatter too much, with a handful of lines of dialogue feeling out of place or just weirdly-timed, but for the most part, I really enjoyed her story.
Hazel’s journey saw her grow in power – as her quest to find her mother was repeatedly derailed by her grandmother, various monsters, and deep dives into her family history and the history of the area around her hometown! The way Hazel unlocked her powers and equipment felt natural, and South of Midnight did a great job of building this up and pairing newfound powers with levels and enemies that allowed me as the player to go to town with them. The powers were well-integrated with gameplay, providing a narrative reason for everything from combat to wall-running… and when Hazel was temporarily stripped of most of her powers late in the game, I felt a profound sense of vulnerability after having gotten used to having them!
Concept art/renders of Hazel. Image: Xbox/Compulsion Games
I thought one of the themes of the story was going to be grief: that Hazel was, ultimately, going to have to come to terms with the loss of both of her parents. Having been in that position myself, I was curious to see how that theme might play out across the story. However, I was pleasantly surprised by a happy ending – with Hazel’s journey to reunite with her mother ending on a positive note. A post-credits scene even implied at Lacey and Laurent had rekindled their relationship, which was doubly sweet.
The narrative leaned on the history of the American South in a big way. Although I’m not from the United States, the American Civil War and its associated issues are an interest of mine, having read history at university. Seeing these very personal tales of how slavery in the antebellum South impacted individual people was gritty, emotional, and incredibly impactful. Hazel, her mother, and many of the people she met on her adventure were African Americans, and the game didn’t try to shy away from the history of slavery or the legacy it still carries on the descendants of enslaved people. Some players might find that uncomfortable – but that’s the point.
The game wrangles with slavery and its lasting legacy.
There were a couple of points, though, where I felt the narrative wasn’t perfect. This is a story about trauma, right? More specifically, how trauma lingers if we bottle it up, and how that only makes it worse. Compulsion Games specifically describes South of Midnight as a game about healing. So why, then, do we barely see any of the aftermath of Hazel’s healing? I felt this most significantly at two points: after the battle against Huggin’ Molly, when a brief storybook line said that Itchy would care for the lost children, and right at the end when Bunny realised that Hazel had interfered and helped Cherie.
Both of these moments were the culmination of a lifetime for their respective characters, but Itchy and the children weren’t even shown on screen, and Bunny was mildly angry for a moment, then disappeared. We could also say the same about Rhubarb and Jolene – after going through hell to help unweave or unravel their traumatic past, we didn’t see the results of that for either of them. Rhubarb – who murdered his own brother – didn’t get closure, comeuppance, or… anything. Hazel and South of Midnight just left him behind.
Itchy’s story didn’t get a proper ending, I felt.
Often when I’m playing a narrative adventure, I want to move the story along and see what’s going to come next. But South of Midnight’s beautiful levels rewarded exploration – and they were tight enough that going off the beaten path didn’t feel like a time-sink or too much of a detour. There were good reasons to explore: both to pad out the story, the world, and the lore by learning more about the history of the region, the characters, and the events, and to upgrade Hazel’s health and skills. I don’t think I found every health upgrade, but I acquired more than enough upgrade points to max out Hazel’s skill tree and upgrade all of her powers.
The readables and other bits of lore-building were great, too, and Hazel always had something to say when discovering a new note or inscription. These little things added a lot to the story in all of the levels. There were heartbreaking messages from kids who’d gone hungry, appealing to a spider-demon for sweets and food. There were gut-wrenching messages about escaping slavery. And there were mementos from Hazel and Lacey’s life, too. All of them were interesting, well-written, and helped build up the narrative experience.
One of the readable messages.
I wanted to say more about South of Midnight’s soundtrack in the spoiler-free section, but most of the songs – which are all original compositions for the game – reference events and characters! The soundtrack is an eclectic mix from across the Deep South: there’s New Orleans jazz on tracks like Rougarou and Roux, Americana or folk on Two-Toed Tom and Benjy, blues for Shakin’ Bones, Life is a Fight to be Won is an acoustic ballad… and throughout the game there are pieces inspired by a variety of genres, as well as a capella music common to enslaved peoples. Some of the tracks are truly haunting, others are upbeat and fun – and they all fit the game just right.
My golden rule for any video game soundtrack is “do no wrong;” i.e. the music shouldn’t clash with or get in the way of the adventure. But it’s rare for me to find a soundtrack quite so emotional and enjoyable as South of Midnight. I’d be happy to add several of these tracks to my playlist to listen to again – which, again, is something very rare for me.
The game has a wonderful soundtrack.
I loved South of Midnight’s art style. But I gotta be honest about something, given its prominence in the game’s marketing material: I didn’t really feel a lot of the “stop-motion” effect. The visuals were clearly drawing on designs and aesthetics from stop-motion films – like those by Tim Burton, for instance – as well as other animated works. But in terms of the way South of Midnight actually looked during gameplay sequences, I didn’t get a ton of “stop-motion” most of the time. Cut-scenes were a different story, with all of them going much more on the stop-motion effects. And there were some moments in the game where I felt the stop-motion effect a bit more strongly; some of Hazel’s idle animations, some of the animals in the environment, and the spiky bramble plants, for instance.
Occasionally, the stop-motion animation could feel a little jittery or jumpy, as if some frames were missing during some sequences. Because it wasn’t a particularly strong visual effect throughout the game, I didn’t mind it. But given how South of Midnight was basically billed as “the stop-motion game,” I must confess that I expected that style to shine through a bit more strongly. Maybe if it had I’d have hated it – and it was a wise decision to include an option to turn it off! But it’s equally plausible that I’d have actually enjoyed seeing South of Midnight really lean into that kind of animation style, and I’m a tad disappointed that there wasn’t a slider or some other option to really dial it up.
The stop-motion effect was most noticeable in cut-scenes.
Hazel’s cuddly companion – Crouton – made for a fun additional gameplay element. Being able to seize control of an enemy made battles feel a bit more fun and tactical; having to choose when to use that power (which has a slow recharge rate) added a bit of strategic thinking. And it’s always fun to have a companion who can fight by your side!
Crouton also dived into burrows, often finding cute animals going about their business. This is another legend: many cultures have tales of “borrowers” living in the walls or underground, taking unwanted things. The burrows were usually fun little places to visit, and reminded me of a bunch of cartoons and kids books – like the aforementioned Watership Down – that featured animals or saw characters visiting these kinds of places. Some of Crouton’s burrows could feel a bit too straightforward – with one clearly-marked route from end to end. That would be my only real criticism.
Crouton.
I’m not usually a fan of waypoints or quest markers in games; I like to explore at my own pace, and a giant arrow telling me where to go can get annoying! But I like the way South of Midnight uses directional indicators – they’re temporary and optional, meaning if you never want to see them you never have to, but they’re there if you need to be pointed in the right direction. And narratively, the way this fit with the game’s Weave and Grand Tapestry ideas made a lot of sense.
Some games just give you a waypoint, a quest marker, and so on without explaining how or why you’ve got this magical ability to see exactly where you need to go! But in South of Midnight it blended in perfectly with Hazel’s other magical abilities, which is something I really appreciated.
I liked the way the game handled waypoints.
So I think that’s it.
If it wasn’t clear already, I adored South of Midnight. It’s one of the best games I’ve played so far this year, and it’s absolutely a contender for one of my end-of-year gaming awards – possibly even the “game of the year” title. But you’ll have to swing by in late December to see if it makes the cut; there are still a few months to go!
Sometimes when you put the control pad down after an intense or emotional game, you can feel a little hollow. South of Midnight was one of those games that I didn’t want to end… but at the same time I was keen to follow the story to its conclusion and see what was going to happen to Hazel and the rest of the characters. It was well-written, generally well-paced, beautifully designed, and just a fantastic all-around experience.
A happy ending.
If you liked Kena: Bridge of Spirits, or similar titles, I really think you’ll enjoy South of Midnight. And if you have Game Pass either on PC or Xbox, it’s almost a no-brainer to fire it up and at least give it a try. I really had a wonderful time going on this adventure with Hazel.
So what game might I try next? There are still a few interesting titles to come later this year – I’ve got my eye on Mafia: The Old Country and Terminator 2D: No Fate. And I should really try Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which I’ve installed but haven’t started yet. And now that Firaxis has had a chance to patch and update Civilization VII, maybe I should jump back in and see what’s new! There’s a lot of gaming content still to come here on the website, though, so I hope you’ll stick around.
South of Midnight is out now for PC and Xbox Series S/X. The game is also available via Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass. South of Midnight is the copyright of Compulsion Games, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
In 1997 or 1998, I had a lot of fun playing Actua Golf 2 on my PC. I didn’t have a lot of PC games at the time – my platform of choice in the second half of the ’90s was a Nintendo 64 – but Actua Golf 2 was a game that ran well on a fairly limited computer that was supposed to be used primarily for school work! It’s strange that I would’ve been interested in a game like that, but having played a demo version and with the game not being particularly expensive, I didn’t mind splashing out.
I found Actua Golf 2 to be a fun and surprisingly challenging title. It was more strategic than most sports games and less about hitting fast button combos, and I found that lining up my shots, choosing which club to use, and so on was a blast – certainly way more entertaining than I would’ve expected. There was a thrill to hitting the ball just right after making all of the right choices, and landing it within touching distance of the hole.
Actua Golf 2 was released for PC and PlayStation in 1997.
When the Nintendo Wii came along in 2006, I was on a long waiting list for a console. Even in those days, manufacturers couldn’t keep up with demand! The Wii launched with Wii Sports bundled alongside, and one of the events included was golf. Tennis and bowling were fun too, don’t get me wrong – and maybe one day we’ll have to take a longer look at Wii Sports! But for now, suffice to say that I had a blast playing golf with my little Wiimote, and of the games included in the package, it was by far the most fun to play on my own. Tennis, bowling, and boxing were definitely games that benefited from having a second player!
Wii Sports was obviously a very different kind of experience from Actua Golf 2, with a much more arcadey, casual feel. Using the Wii’s motion controls felt gimmicky at first, I must admit, but even though due to my declining health I could only play while seated, I still had fun with it. Nintendo really nailed the whole “casual game” concept with the Wii, and the nature of golf makes it a great sport to use for a gentler, less intense experience. It still took full advantage of the Wii’s motion control system, but in a completely different way from the tennis or boxing games.
Wii Sports was a ton of fun!
I’ve never been a particularly sporty person in real life. Even as a kid, when I wasn’t bedevilled by health issues and disability, playing sports wasn’t something that held a great deal of appeal. I played rugby at school – but only when forced to in PE lessons – and as a kid, football was regularly played at one of the clubs I attended. But the rest of the time, I’d have my nose in a book or I’d be doing other things. One kid I knew at school had a dad who played golf regularly, but I never went to the course with them. The closest I’ve ever gotten to playing a real round was when I went to the mini-golf course!
All of this is to say that I have a weird history with golf and golf games! It’s not a sport I care about in the slightest, and if you asked me to explain what the difference is between a wedge and an iron, or who the current champions are on the world tour, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea. But as a casual gamer, and as someone who enjoys slower-paced, “cosy” gaming experiences, I find golf games fit the bill. And that’s how I came to spend much of the first half of 2024 playing EA Sports PGA Tour on my PC.
It’s true… I’m a golfer.
I’ve been a subscriber to Microsoft’s PC Game Pass service for a couple of years now, and having that subscription has felt like a pretty good deal most of the time. I got to play games I never would’ve purchased for myself – especially at full-price – thanks to Game Pass, and I’ve even tried out titles that wouldn’t have even been on my radar. Not all of them have been “my thing,” and there have been some disappointments with Game Pass along the way, too. But by and large, I’m someone who’ll speak positively about Game Pass. In my opinion, it’s a great way for players on a budget to get into current-gen gaming.
But I think we’re slightly off-topic!
Microsoft has a deal with Electronic Arts that has brought more than eighty EA games to Game Pass. I don’t think Game Pass gets the most up-to-date versions of all of EA’s sports games – the likes of EA Sports FC and the Madden American football titles don’t seem to join the service on release day. Don’t quote me on that, but I think that’s how it works. Anyway, one of the EA sports games that has recently joined the Game Pass lineup has been the aforementioned EA Sports PGA Tour. And although it had been a while since I last played much simulated golf, I thought I’d give it a whirl.
Microsoft and Electronic Arts have a deal that’s brought a number of EA Sports titles (and other EA games) to Game Pass.
I don’t play a lot of sports games or even really games published by Electronic Arts. And it’s definitely worth taking a detour to talk about just how over-monetised EA’s sports franchises have become. FIFA – or EA Sports FC as it’s now known – has become notorious for its random in-game gambling, and for selling expensive items and in-game “points,” but I confess that I was surprised to see how corrupt PGA Tour is in that regard, too. I’m not an online gamer, but even in PGA Tour’s offline mode, spending in-game currency is required to get all but the most basic golf clubs and outfits for the player character, and there are plenty of “XP boosters” and other single-use items to briefly improve your stats.
An article or essay on the shocking state of microtransactions is long overdue here on the website. But for now, suffice to say that I find these things offensive. A simple piece of clothing like a hat or a pair of shoes, or basic cosmetic equipment like different ball colours or club designs – none of which have any impact on gameplay – are not things that should be locked behind a paywall. In-game currency is “earned” at an impossibly slow rate when playing in single-player mode, and PGA Tour also employs a storefront that only carries a handful of items at a time – presumably to heighten the need for players to pay extra for in-game currency for fear of missing out. These psychological tricks are manipulative and obscene, yet they’ve become so common in modern titles that I doubt any player would even bat an eye at the state of a game like PGA Tour any more.
Part of the in-game microtransaction shop.
I enjoy a game with good customisation options, and a title like PGA Tour – where you see your character all the time from a third-person perspective – should be one where changing outfits and trying on different shirts, hats, and golf club designs simply adds to the fun. EA has chosen to monetise this as much as possible, providing a meagre selection of basic cosmetics at the start of the game and effectively locking the rest behind an expensive paywall. I get it: this isn’t The Sims or a role-playing game where outfits and costumes are a huge part of gameplay. But the fact that these basic items are unavailable except to players who are either willing to grind through a bunch of deliberately awkward challenges or pay up… it makes me angry, to be honest. And as we’re going to talk about, that’s not what I come to a golf game for!
When the Star Wars Battlefront II debacle exploded a few years ago, I really thought that the industry might be about to turn the page on microtransactions and randomised lootboxes. The backlash to that game was so intense that even governments started getting involved, and it seemed for a brief moment as if genuine change was a possibility. Slowly, though, the greedy corporations at the top of the industry have kept pushing, and microtransactions in games today are at least as bad – and in some cases, are much worse – than they ever were in Battlefront II. For me, PGA Tour is a disappointing example of this – but I’m sure you can think of a great many others.
A golf ball in flight.
However, when I step away from the microtransaction marketplace… I gotta admit that I’m having a lot of fun playing EA Sports PGA Tour. There are some things about the game that I don’t like, sure, but by and large it’s recapturing that feeling that I used to get from Actua Golf 2 almost thirty years ago. It’s gentle, more often than not relaxing, but still a game that poses a challenge and that requires some thinking. Button-mashing won’t get you very far – and that’s something I appreciate!
I’ve mentioned this before here on the website, but I suffer from arthritis that affects my hands and fingers. My dominant hand has been made worse this past year after I suffered several broken bones in a fall, and I find that my ability to make frame-perfect button presses or complicated multi-button combos is greatly diminished. I was never the world’s best gamer by any stretch, but my abilities continue to decline thanks to health-related issues. Faster-paced titles like fighting games or first-person shooters are increasingly difficult!
Swinging the golf club.
One thing I’ve enjoyed about playing PGA Tour is how few buttons I need to press and how I don’t have to continuously grip the control pad. The default control scheme when using a control pad involves pulling back and flicking one of the analogue sticks to swing the club and strike the ball, and I actually really like this method. It feels interactive; like a half-step (or a quarter-step, I guess) between the simple button presses or mouse clicks of older golf games and the full motion controls of the Wii. And most importantly from a selfish point of view: it’s something I can do without pain!
That’s not to say I’m especially good at it; my timing can still absolutely suck! But controlling a golf game this way feels surprisingly intuitive. I know I’m probably a decade late (or more) with this compliment, but I really enjoy what this control scheme has done for what was already a fun experience. After lining up my shot, I like that I can set the controller down and really focus on getting my “swing” just right!
Putting the ball.
There are a good number of golf courses in PGA Tour, and these range in terms of difficulty. I think there’s perhaps an overabundance of courses in the United States, and this comes at the expense of other parts of the world. There are no courses at all from Asia, Africa, or South/Central America, for instance, and only one each from France, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, and the Dominican Republic. If PGA Tour is still being supported and updated, adding a handful of new courses from different parts of the world would be a nice touch.
There is diversity of environments in the courses on offer, though, with courses built in desert locales, mountains, and on coastlines all being present. And all of them are rendered beautifully.
St. Andrews: the home of golf!
PGA Tour is nothing special when it comes to the way human characters look, and facial expressions in particular can be pretty lacklustre. Nothing about the way people look feels current-gen, and some of the crowds can actually feel quite outdated in terms of both appearance and their simplified, copy-and-pasted animations. Player characters look a bit better, but still unspectacular. Compared with what we know is possible on current-gen hardware, there’s a lot of work to do for the next iteration of this series!
But the courses themselves are something else. They look outstanding, with grass, trees, plants, and even water being beautifully recreated. Running on my PC, with an RTX 3070 Ti graphics card, these courses have all looked absolutely fantastic, and sometimes it’s been fun to just watch the flyover of each hole and take in the setting. I’m never gonna get invited to any of these fancy places, so seeing them digitally recreated is the closest I can hope to get! Thankfully, PGA Tour does a good job.
There are some beautiful courses in PGA Tour.
I think the beautiful and realistic courses are another reason why playing PGA Tour has been so relaxing for me over these recent months. Getting lost in a digital setting isn’t always an easy feeling for any game to conjure up, so when a title can bring its environments to life like this… it really is a thing to see. I don’t think we’re at quite the same level of graphical beauty as a title like Kena: Bridge of Spirits or Red Dead Redemption II managed… but it’s not a million miles away.
As with many other sports games, PGA Tour features commentary from real commentators. I confess that I had no idea who any of them were before playing the game, but I daresay folks who regularly watch golf events on television will, and the inclusion of familiar voices in the commentary box will be another fun addition. One thing I’ve enjoyed about the commentary in PGA Tour is how the commentators will share their knowledge of not only each course, but most of the individual holes as well; rather than just commenting on events as they unfold, that little bit of extra information at the beginning is neat.
It can be worth listening to what the commentators have to say at the beginning of each hole.
There are places where the commentary is limited, of course – as you’d expect from any sports game, really! I find that I hear a few lines repeated quite often, and in some situations the game only has a single line from the commentators, so there isn’t always a lot of variety. If, like me, you regularly miss your longer putts and end up having to take an extra shot, well… be prepared to hear the commentators take note of that. Over and over again!
Jokes aside, I’ve been having a fun time with PGA Tour. It reminds me of playing Actua Golf 2 way back when, and it’s been both an entertaining challenge and a surprisingly relaxing experience. I would never have chosen to go out and buy a golf game, but when I was browsing Game Pass it leapt out at me, and I’m glad I gave it a whirl. It’s not gonna be anyone’s “game of the year” or anything like that – not unless you’re a hardened golf fanatic! But I’ve sunk quite a few hours into the game by this point, and in spite of some limitations and a downright aggressive in-game storefront, I’ve had fun.
All titles discussed above are the copyright of their respective studio, developer, and/or publisher. Actua Golf 2 and Wii Sports are currently out of print, but second-hand copies are often available for purchase. EA Sports PGA Tour is out now for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Starfield’s main quest – including its ending.
I know, I know: I keep telling you that I’m “done” talking about Starfield… only to pop up again a few weeks later with another new article or something else to add! So perhaps I’d better stop saying that this will be my last-ever piece about Starfield and just take it as it comes!
Over the past couple of weeks, Starfield has come back into focus for me. The recent Fallout television series has seen a surge of interest in Bethesda’s other sci-fi property, with both Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 seeing massive player numbers in April 2024. Both games were already running ahead of Starfield – which seems to have dropped out of the charts altogether by this point – but with talk of Bethesda potentially greenlighting some new Fallout project to tie in with the second season of the show, it really puts into perspective how far Starfield has fallen.
Don’t forget to check out my review of the Fallout TV series, by the way. You can find it by clicking or tapping here.
The Fallout TV series has given a big boost to the games.
So here’s the deal: if you’ve read my first impressions of the game, or any of my other post-launch articles, you’ll know that I was underwhelmed by Starfield. There were elements of the game that had potential – but none that truly lived up to the hype. I didn’t hate Starfield by any means, and when I looked back at the worst or most disappointing gaming experiences of 2023, it didn’t seem fair to include it there, either. But the game was clearly not all it could’ve been.
Today, what I’d like to do is throw out a few of my (totally unsolicited) ideas for how Starfield could be improved. None of these are “magic bullets” capable of turning the game into a 10/10 perfect experience. I think that ship has sailed! But even within the confines of Starfield’s limitations, there are ways in which the game could be improved to make it worth returning to. I’m not proposing a total overhaul or re-making of the game, nor am I asking for something totally unrealistic like a brand-new main quest or recreating the game in a new engine. Instead, I’m trying to propose reasonable changes to certain systems or additions that wouldn’t undermine or fundamentally break the game as it currently exists.
My character on the surface of an icy moon.
If that sounds like something you’re interested in, let me begin with my usual caveats! First of all, I have no “insider information.” I’m not trying to claim that anything discussed below can, will, or must be included in a future update or expansion for Starfield. This is a wishlist from an ex-player, and nothing more.
Secondly, all of this is my entirely subjective opinion. If you loved Starfield in its original form, think the game is utterly irredeemable, or just hate all of my suggestions, that’s totally okay! There’s plenty of room in the Starfield and Bethesda fan communities for polite discussion and disagreement – and we don’t need to get into an argument about hypothetical ideas for the game that Bethesda may never include.
With all of that out of the way, let’s get started!
Number One: Empty Planets.
A man-made structure on a random planet.
Considering that one of the biggest complaints I repeatedly hear about Starfield is that “too many of the planets are empty and boring,” this might seem counter-intuitive. But bear with me, because I genuinely believe that making a portion of the game’s planets completely empty would be a significant improvement.
One of the things I wanted most of all from a game like Starfield was the sense of going “where no man has gone before,” and being the first person to set foot in an alien landscape. Like a Starfleet officer, I wanted to explore the galaxy – after all, isn’t that supposed to be the mission of Constellation, the main faction that players are forced to join in Starfield?
Landing on a planet where people have already been – and are still actively living – isn’t really “exploration,” is it?
But instead, the way Bethesda chose to create planets has meant that there are none – literally zero – that are empty. Humans have set foot on all of Starfield’s 1,000 planets, and it’s completely impossible to pick a landing zone that doesn’t already have pre-made structures, points of interest, shipwrecks, spaceship landing sites, and more. Any chance to feel like a bona fide explorer was lost… and for me, one of the single most crucial elements of a “space game” melted away as I came to realise that.
Empty planets in Starfield could serve a variety of purposes. Building outposts and habitats is one – because honestly, who wants to build their dream home or pirate base a few metres away from a spacer hideout, a commonly-used landing site, and an abandoned research tower? Such worlds could also contain more resources – and with a potential overhaul to the way resources are collected and used in-game, becoming a miner or space-trucker could become viable in-game career options.
Scanning a planetary body from orbit.
I loved the idea of finding a desolate planet, far away from civilisation, and building my luxury space penthouse there. I loved the idea of hopping from world to world, collecting rare resources that could be sold or traded, and upgrading my ship so that I could carry more and more cargo. Starfield offers the illusion of this through “mission boards,” but these are so barebones and non-interactive that they hardly even count.
I’d take the core of the Settled Systems – worlds around Sol, Alpha Centauri, and Cheyenne – and leave them more or less as they are. But the further out players get from those core worlds with their bigger settlements, the greater the number of genuinely empty planets there should be. I think this change could work wonders for Starfield, especially if it were to be combined with some of the other suggestions and proposals on this list.
Number Two: New and Modified “Points of Interest,” Including Different Variants.
Arriving at a “deserted biotics lab.”
Within my first few hours of playing Starfield, I’d been to the same “abandoned research tower” and the same “abandoned mine” four or five times each. I hoped that I was just unlucky – that there were many more of these copy-and-paste structures out there and I’d just run into the same couple of them a few times. But there really are only a few of these – some of which don’t have much going on. Considering how big the game is and how Bethesda expected players to want to spend hundreds of hours playing Starfield over the span of a decade, that’s pretty poor, and has been a huge weight around Starfield’s neck.
What the game desperately needs is many, many more of these so-called “points of interest.” Just to start, I’d say there ought to be four times as many as there currently are, and every free update should be adding new ones on top of that. But even if that were to happen, the fact that all of these structures – and everything within – are literally identical from one appearance to the next means that further changes are needed.
Discovering another copy-and-paste location.
So here’s my next proposal: each point of interest should come with multiple variants. I wouldn’t mind encountering the same structure half as much if the NPCs and loot contained within were in different configurations every time! It would make approaching one of these structures feel a bit more tense, too – you wouldn’t know whether you were about to encounter friendly NPCs, hostile enemies, alien monsters, or something else.
Taking the “abandoned research tower” as an example (because I played through several of those!) Here are some variant ideas: one variant could be the same as it is now, with hostile pirate NPCs having made the tower into their base. A second variant could contain scientists and researchers, perhaps even with a quest-giver to provide radiant quests or missions on the planet. A third could also have scientists, but be guarded by soldiers belonging to one faction or another, with players who haven’t gained enough ranks in that faction being turned away… or having to sneak in! A fourth variant could be totally empty, but with audio logs and notes suggesting something bad happened. A fifth could be filled with terrormorphs or other hostile monsters. And so on. How much more interesting would it be to approach an “abandoned research tower” if you didn’t know which variant you were going to get?
A non-hostile NPC at a random location.
There could also be unique once-per-playthrough points of interest that still appear at random but are never repeated. These could be variants of common structures or complete one-offs – ideally a mix of both. Some might spawn randomly on a certain planet or only in a certain biome, and others could be 100% random, with exclusive loot or quests to participate in. Clues could be left behind in the world to guide players to their locations.
In any case, one of the biggest things holding Starfield back is the incredibly repetitive dungeons/points of interest. I don’t think they can be entirely scrubbed from the game due to the way it’s made, but even just adding new and different variants of the current points of interest would be a start. Creating brand-new ones to add to the game ought to be a priority, too.
Number Three: Changes to the Ship-Builder. (Part One)
Starfield’s ship-building system.
Starfield’s ship-builder is one of the game’s best features… but it’s imperfect, finicky, and in serious need of some quality-of-life improvements. Firstly, it’s a pain in the arse to have to trek from one vendor to another to be able to design my ship exactly how I’d like it! Enabling players to access all ship parts at all vendors – or to unlock different constructors’ parts and use them from that point on – would massively improve the ship-building experience.
Being able to unlock different parts or groups of parts and then use them at all ship-building stations would be a massive improvement, one that this otherwise decent system desperately needs. The easiest way, I think, would be for each manufacturer to grant players a “license” (or other in-game jargon) for their pieces, permanently unlocking them. This would mean that players would still have to work to unlock all the different parts; they wouldn’t just be there by default. But it would also mean that there’d be no need to keep travelling between star stations and planets to add one component that’s only available in one location.
It’s a pain to have to continually travel between locations to access all of the different spaceship components.
Secondly, I’d want to see Starfield combine its interior decorating – which is currently only present in the outpost builder – with ship-building. This could be optional, meaning that players who aren’t interested wouldn’t have to participate. But one area of the ship-builder that I felt really let down the whole system was the lack of interior customisation.
It’s possible for players to drop items aboard their ship and have them remain where they fall – something that was epitomised by “sandwich lady” in the Starfield Direct marketing broadcast. But this is a Bethesda game hallmark that’s been present since Morrowind… and it hasn’t been improved in any way for almost a quarter of a century. Not only that, but any modification to a ship – even if those modifications don’t change the interior or layout in any way – would lead to all items being removed and dumped in the ship’s inventory. So even that very, very basic amount of interior customisation comes with a massive downside!
It’s possible to drop and clumsily reposition items on your ship – like this wooden duck.
At the very least, I’d like to be able to choose colours for the walls, floors, and doors, as well as choose where doors and hatches in between modules will appear. At present, there are only pre-set colours and doors appear at random; this should be easily added with a modicum of effort!
If I dared to dream, I’d like to see furniture options for each module, posters and wall art to decorate the ship, and everything from rugs to kitchen appliances, all with different designs and colour variants to choose from. One of the disappointing things for me was that, despite making my ship look the way I wanted from the outside, it never really felt like “mine” when I was exploring the inside. There was a half-eaten sandwich on a table that my character didn’t bite. There were math equations on a whiteboard in my captain’s cabin that I didn’t write. And I would have never chosen such a ghastly colour scheme!
Number Four: Changes to the Ship-Builder. (Part Two)
The ship services technician on Akila.
Sticking with Starfield’s ship-builder, there are a few more places where I think improvements could be made. Firstly, having to manually “assign” weapons is finicky and annoying, and there has got to be a better way to do this. Ideally, weapons would be automatically assigned as soon as they’re added to a ship, with the same slot always being used for the same weapon type. Heck, there are only four types of shipboard weapons in the game – so ensuring that each one is always assigned the same button shouldn’t be that difficult!
Secondly, adding the option to rotate ship pieces would be nice. Maybe not every single piece would need to be rotatable – engines, for instance, as well as cockpits might be tricky. But some layouts might work better a different way around, and being able to have some hab modules running “sideways” could open up a lot more combinations. There are also visual and aesthetic reasons for wanting to be able to rotate certain ship pieces – and this must surely be achievable without ruining the ship-builder!
Having to manually “assign” weapons is a pain in the arse.
It would also be great if there was some way to preview how different ship pieces look on the inside without having to buy them. The in-game descriptions of the likes of the brig and armoury are pretty barebones, and it’s only after purchasing an expensive hab and installing it that players actually get to see what it looks like. If the look isn’t right, if it doesn’t match the rest of the ship, or if it doesn’t do what players had been expecting… it can end up being a waste of time and credits.
This could be combined with the interior decorating and doorway positioning additions that I suggested above. The preview window could show different colour variants, for instance, and also allow players to choose where to place hatches, doorways, and even ladders.
Adding a new module in the ship-builder.
Finally, if players have a particular ship component on another vessel in their fleet, it should be possible – somehow – to swap parts between ships. Even if removing a part from one ship to add it to another made the first ship un-spaceworthy, if that wasn’t the player’s currently-assigned ship, then it should be okay. It seems silly to allow players to amass a fleet of ships that could have perfectly usable components, but be unable to swap them between different vessels in the fleet. Having to buy the same part more than once – especially if other ships are unused and just sitting there – feels like something that could be avoided.
The ship-builder is definitely one of the better game modes that Starfield introduced, building on the likes of Fallout 4′s settlement system. But there are ways in which it could be improved, allowing players to really make their ship into the flying home of their dreams!
Number Five: Alternate Starting Points for Different Character Backgrounds.
Every character starts here – regardless of how they’re set up.
It never made a lot of sense to me that a xenobiologist, a professor, or a diplomat would have ended up working in a mine. Sure, an ex-soldier or a criminal on the run might’ve taken a gig like that… but some of Starfield’s backgrounds just don’t gel with the game’s opening act. Rather than changing the entire opening (starting from a prison cell would’ve worked better, IMHO) perhaps Bethesda could add just a couple of alternate starts to account for some of these different backgrounds.
Look at what Cyberpunk 2077 did with its life paths as an example. There are three different starts in that game, each of which sees V living a different life in a different place. They all come together to kick-start the main storyline, but the journey to that point is pretty different. Even though the life paths don’t matter once the game gets going (there’s one mission apiece midway through, but they were pretty basic and uninteresting), the way the game begins offers players a different role-playing experience.
Starfield could offer alternate starts that work similarly to Cyberpunk 2077′s life paths.
Each Starfield starting point could still see players grabbing an artefact on the mining planet of Vectera if that’s important to Bethesda, but how players get to that point could change depending on which start was chosen. For example, players who wanted to imagine their character as a spacefarer could begin in space, landing on the planet to transport the unearthed artefact to New Atlantis. Or players could begin working in the mine’s laboratory, studying the artefact.
I’d also like to see at least one starting point that didn’t force players down the Constellation/main quest route immediately. Players could choose not to engage with the artefact, for instance, or could choose not to accept Barrett’s offer. After the pirate attack on Vectera, players could commandeer the pirate ship instead of being given the Frontier. These are just a few ideas off the top of my head!
Many of the available backgrounds don’t line up with working in a mine at the beginning of the game.
I don’t think Bethesda would need to go overboard here. There could be two or three mining-adjacent roles that could see players on Vectera in just the right place at just the right time to pick up the artefact. But these could be different enough from one another to take into account the different player backgrounds on offer in Starfield, which is something that I think would make a lot more sense.
If nothing else, adding a couple of alternate starting points would add to the game’s replayability, as it has for Cyberpunk 2077. There are ways to implement something like this without radically changing the game’s main story or even its opening act, and when it comes to the role-playing side of things – the side that makes me want to lose myself in a character and their fictional world – it would be a huge improvement.
Number Six: Make In-Game Careers Viable.
I was unimpressed with Starfield’s mission boards.
One of the things I love to do in a big open-world game is to step away from the main story and get lost in the world. In order to do that, my character needs to be more than just a generic adventurer… so in-game career options need to exist. And no, I don’t mean getting a job with one of the factions that quickly sees the player character climb the ladder to become its leader! I mean jobs that are off to one side, not really connected to any of the main questlines.
For example, it could be possible to be an explorer: charting unexplored and unvisited planets. Players could send probes to the surface, like in Mass Effect 2, to scout landing sites, then disembark and either map the area or collect different resources. These planetary surveys – which would actually require work to complete – could then be returned to Constellation for a profit… or sold to one of the game’s other factions. As players acquire a reputation for exploration, new quests could even arise, with factions offering players bigger rewards to survey planets further and further afield.
The mission board in New Atlantis.
Being a long hauler – one of the actual in-game backgrounds – could also be a career option. Using the mission boards, players could collect cargo from one planet and take it to another, either under contract or just to buy and sell. Different planets or settlements could have different resources or items that they’re asking for, and this could change week-to-week.
These missions would need to be much more interactive than they are currently, with players having to manually load and unload cargo, perhaps, or travelling to meet up with different NPCs inside settlements instead of just having a mission marked as “complete” as soon as the ship touches down! But there’s potential in this system to expand it and make it into a bona fide “space trucking simulator.”
Mining a resource.
Finally, for a game that kicked off deep inside a mine… there’s basically no reason to do any actual mining in Starfield. Resources are so worthless and sparsely spread out that I found there was absolutely no point in mining them when exploring a planet. If I desperately wanted to complete a research project or something, it was easier and quicker to loot a spacer base, sell the items for credits, and buy whatever resource I was missing.
But all of that could change! Making resources more abundant and accessible on different planets could make mining a viable in-game career. Tweaking the value of these resources could also make it much more worthwhile, and it could be strangely relaxing to spend an hour or two mining mercury or lithium to haul back to New Atlantis and sell it. I’m not alone in enjoying those kinds of slower-paced, “cosy” experiences… and it’s actually something I was hoping to get out of Starfield. As things stand, it’s way too unbalanced and grindy, but I can see the potential for a fun time hiding just under the surface!
Number Seven: An Alternate Ending/Reframe the Starborn.
One of the Starborn early in the game.
I hesitate to call this an “alternate” ending… because one of Starfield’s big narrative problems is that many of the fundamental questions present in its main story didn’t get any kind of conclusion in the first place. But that’s beside the point! What I’d like to see, as players reach the final act of the main quest, is the option to reject the Unity and to really push back against the whole concept of becoming Starborn. Not simply choosing not to go through the Unity, but actively stating how evil it is and the Starborn are and rejecting the whole thing.
The game puts Starborn adversaries in the player’s way, but most of these are unexplained, nameless non-entities that don’t really feel like actual people. The only two Starborn characters that players can engage with, the Hunter and the Emissary, have both been “reborn” hundreds or thousands of times over in many different universes – and the game actively pushes players to do the same thing. In fact, it’s the only way to fully complete the main quest.
Completing the main quest requires players to travel to a new universe.
But there are huge implications to abandoning one’s entire universe and everyone in it, and Starfield doesn’t do much more than pay lip service to this. It’s possible, for instance, for players to have a romantic partner or even get married – but their spouse doesn’t travel to a new universe with them. It’s implied that, based on choices the player has made, their universe of origin will be permanently changed in some way by their becoming Starborn… but this raises some massive ethical questions. Again, Starfield does nothing with these ideas.
So here’s my proposal: introduce new dialogue during the final act of the main quest that makes clear that the player rejects the entire concept of the Unity and becoming Starborn – and not only that, but they want to kill the Hunter and the Emissary to make sure that no one else can ever become Starborn either. However many universes these two might’ve fucked up… it ends here.
I’d like to see a “rejection” option added to the end of the main quest.
This is what I’d want to do if I found myself in that situation, confronted with a weird mirror image of myself telling me that “the Creators created everything,” and that becoming a Starborn is my destiny. No – fuck that. I’m from this universe, I want to stay in this universe, and I want to make damn sure that these Starborn clowns won’t be able to harm or kill anyone in the next universe, either. This universe-hopping quest ends here – not just for my character, but for all of the Starborn.
The Starborn and the Unity are the game’s real villains – at least until we get a proper explanation for the artefacts, their purpose, and where they came from. And I would want to see that reality reflected in the game’s final act, with players able to choose to reject the very idea of the Unity and the Starborn and ensuring they can’t go on harming people across countless parallel realities.
Number Eight: Quests with Multiple Pathways to Completion.
Battling a Spacer Captain at the climax of a quest.
One very disappointing thing about Starfield is how damn linear so many of its quests are. Most quests only have one route from beginning to end, and playing the game can feel like you’re riding a bike with training wheels half of the time. It ought to be possible to complete at least some quests in different ways, utilising different combinations of combat, tech, stealth, and even piloting skills depending on how players have set up their characters and which skills they’ve chosen to invest in.
Perhaps Starfield was harmed by comparisons with Baldur’s Gate 3, which was released just a month earlier. Actually, scratch that. Starfield was undeniably harmed by those comparisons! Baldur’s Gate 3 opens up practically all of its quests and characters, giving players a huge amount of freedom to decide how they want to tackle the game – leading to some incredibly fun gameplay moments. It’s possible for practically everyone in the game to die – something Starfield doesn’t allow with its “unkillable” NPCs – and for many quests to be tackled in radically different ways.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is overflowing with player choice and different ways to complete quests.
Where I got frustrated with Starfield was when the game presented the illusion of choice. At one now-infamous mission on Neon, players are teamed up with Walter to acquire another artefact. Walter states multiple times that there will be different ways to approach this interaction – but that turns out to be a lie. The game forces players down one path, and one path only.
Just taking this one mission as an example, it should be possible to abandon Walter and acquire the artefact alone, either by stealthily stealing it, killing the person carrying it, or causing panic at the nightclub and seizing it in the chaos. Then, after the player’s ship is impounded, there should be multiple options for escaping Neon. Players could sneak to the landing pad, knock out the guards, and disable the lockdown, or even rush over to another landing bay and steal a different ship. Just within this one mission there are so many ways things could go – but Bethesda has insisted that players must be locked onto one very specific route.
There should’ve been multiple approaches to this mission on Neon.
And there are many missions like this – both in main questlines and just out in the world. One side-story that I encountered involved a group of families on different planets and moons who found themselves in conflict with a gang of spacers. But there was only one way to complete every step of this mission – getting their communications back up and running, solving a conflict within the group, and then boarding the spacers’ station and killing them all. There should be so many different options in a mission like this – such as siding with the spacers for a reward, picking one family over the other when they argue, sneaking aboard the spacers’ station and opening all of the airlocks, or building a missile launcher on one of the moons and blowing it up from 10,000km away. Those are just a handful of ideas off the top of my head.
It’s obviously true that not every mission can have 100 different outcomes and routes to completion. But there should be some degree of choice in a role-playing game, for goodness’ sake! Even if all Bethesda can do at this point is make it so that some unkillable NPCs can now die and add one new alternate path for a handful of main story missions… that would still be a noticeable improvement.
Number Nine: More Cosmetic Items and Apparel.
It doesn’t take long to find NPCs wearing the same outfit as you!
I was quite disappointed with Starfield’s lack of cosmetic items – clothing in particular. For some reason, clothing only comes by way of whole outfits, with no option to mix and match different tops, trousers, or shoes – and there are almost no skirts, shorts, or different kinds of headgear beyond basic baseball caps and the occasional cowboy hat. Even Starfield’s omnipresent spacesuits are cosmetically limited, with the few available options having no colour variants.
It seems a given that Bethesda and Microsoft plan to add skins as paid-for microtransactions at a future point. You can even see in the game just where these skins will appear when they’re ready to be rolled out. But in my opinion, cosmetic microtransactions have no place in a wholly single-player game, and Bethesda should’ve added a lot more cosmetic variety to Starfield for free from day one.
Clothes shopping in Starfield isn’t much fun.
As far back as Morrowind it was possible to play dress-up by choosing different trousers, tops, shoes, and even individual pieces of armour. This would already make Starfield’s whole-body costumes feel like a backwards step even if there weren’t so few of them… but a combination of a lack of different costumes combined with the inability to select individual pieces of clothing comes together to make for an apparel system that’s underwhelming in the extreme.
For me, one part of the role-playing experience is getting my character to look exactly the way I want them to, and when Starfield offers such a limited range of costumes, that’s impossible. Most outfits in Starfield fall into one of two categories: generic “futuristic” sci-fi or western/cowboy. There’s very little diversity, no way to reflect different cultures and backgrounds… and for a game that makes a selling-point of its photo mode, there’s very little worth photographing from the available outfits.
Wearing a cowboy hat in Akila City.
Things like fashion sense and personal style are, of course, incredibly subjective – so you might enjoy the outfits and spacesuits that Starfield has to offer. That’s great – but even if you like some or all of the costumes available, adding new ones into the mix, as well as expanding the existing lineup with new colour variants and designs, can only be a good thing! I’d love to see Starfield add a lot more costumes and outfits, as well as skins and colour variants – all for free. There shouldn’t be paid skins in a game of this type.
And while we’re at it, let’s create some wholly unique cosmetic items that can only be found once per playthrough. One of the fun things about past Bethesda games used to be exploring dungeons and following questlines and being rewarded with something shiny and new! The only outfit in Starfield that comes close to falling into that category is the Starborn spacesuit… and I wasn’t especially wild about the way it looks.
Number Ten: Actual Spaceflight/Piloting.
There’s not much of an opportunity to be a pilot…
Starfield is a game set in space. It encourages players to build and customise their own spacecraft. Ship-to-ship combat takes place in real-time in space. But there’s absolutely no spaceflight in this game. Let me explain what I mean by that: players can’t get in their ship and manually fly it from one location to another. The only option is a modified form of fast-travel that generates a small bubble of space around the player’s ship. As some folks have demonstrated, there are no “real” planets or objects within that bubble; they’re just jpegs floating in the background.
Of all the points I’ve raised today, this could be the hardest to fix. Starfield is built from the ground up around fast-travelling between locations, and the way in which pockets of space are generated in orbit of planets or near starstations would need to be expanded and changed in a significant way in order to make real spaceflight work. Ships, too, would need to change – with better and faster engines being options for players who long for that space-sim experience.
Starfield appears to be built around fast-travelling from the galaxy map.
So there are real logistical issues in the way of adding bona fide spaceflight to Starfield. But I think it’s worth trying, at least – because if the only option is to fast-travel between locations, much of what appeals about taking to the stars is lost. Locations don’t feel far away from one another if players can teleport there in a few seconds, meaning much of the scale of Starfield’s galaxy – something that already feels diminished in light of its tiny cities, repetitive NPCs, and copy-and-pasted points of interest – is lost.
In past Bethesda titles, the journey from place to place was a significant part of the gameplay in and of itself. Walking from Seyda Neen to Balmora in Morrowind could lead to random combat encounters, side-quests, and interactions with NPCs. In Fallout 3, travelling from Megaton to the radio tower likewise saw the player presented with new opportunities to get lost in the game’s world and have fun. Heck, the recent Fallout TV series even referenced how exploring the wasteland often leads to getting side-tracked!
Part of the fun of past Bethesda games was journeying from place to place and stumbling upon new adventures along the way.
In short, the lack of spaceflight means there are fewer opportunities for players to take their time and explore Starfield’s galaxy in their own way at their own pace. When not on the surface of a planet – or approached by a random ship in orbit – there’s basically no way for players to get side-tracked by being offered a totally different quest or mission in a way that feels natural.
Starfield having functionally no spaceflight doesn’t just harm the game from a space-sim or space game perspective, it also denies players one of the fundamental building blocks of a Bethesda open-world game, too. I don’t know how it could realistically be implemented at this stage – and flying in between star systems would probably have to remain as fast-travel only. But making an effort to get proper spaceflight up and running would be worth it as it would be a huge improvement to Starfield’s immersion and gameplay.
So that’s it!
Does Starfield need to be rushed to the medical bay?
We’ve considered ten ways that Starfield could be improved – in my humble opinion, of course.
Although I spent close to a decade working in the games industry, I’m not a developer. I don’t know whether some or all of these ideas might’ve once been considered for Starfield, but were ultimately cut because they proved to be unpopular, impractical, or unworkable. The game’s very existence is, in some respects, a technological achievement; that Bethesda managed to build something this complex using the zombified remains of a game engine that’s more than twenty-five years old should count for something, right?
But I’m not alone in finding Starfield to be an underwhelming experience to play, and the fact that it didn’t win any big awards and seems to have dropped out of our collective cultural conversation after just a few months is testament to that. Starfield was being regularly beaten by Skyrim and Fallout 4 in terms of active players even before the Fallout TV show brought renewed attention to that franchise… and unless Microsoft and Bethesda take bold action in the months and years ahead, Starfield may very well end up being forgotten.
A custom spaceship on the landing pad at New Atlantis.
I’ve said before that I believe the only way to save Starfield is if its first major expansion is at least as big and impressive as Cyberpunk 2077′s Phantom Liberty DLC was last year. Tinkering around the edges won’t cut it, and if Bethesda can’t find a way to build a significant improvement to Starfield – not just a narrative addition or the inclusion of a new questline – then I think the game’s longer-term prospects will remain bleak.
I’ve had my say, and I’ve made my suggestions! Maybe not all of them would work, and maybe some of them are impossible due to the technical limitations of Bethesda’s game engine or the less-powerful Xbox Series S console. But Starfield would be a damn sight better if they were included… and really, some of these things should have been present at launch.
Could Starfield get its redemption arc one day? Never say never…
Starfield is out now for PC and Xbox Series S & X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Starfield’s main quest, including its ending.
I have to confess that I haven’t played a lot more of Starfield since I last shared my thoughts on the game, its flaws, and how Bethesda might want to respond to some of the biggest points of criticism. But as I’ve sat with the game in the month since it released, I’ve found a few more things to say that I didn’t get to mention in either of my two big post-launch pieces about Starfield. It’s these points that we’re going to talk about today – and if you ignored the spoiler warning above, please know that we’re going to discuss the ending of the main quest and Starfield’s New Game Plus mode.
I feel that Skyrim’s unprecedented success changed something at Bethesda. The company ceased viewing its games as individual stories to be created, completed, and published, and instead began seeing all of its projects as ongoing, long-running experiences. Because Skyrim remained popular for years after its release, Bethesda seems to have internalised that and expected it to become the “new normal,” deliberately taking steps to build all future games with that goal in mind. We saw that most obviously with Fallout 76, but I’d argue very strongly that it happened with Starfield as well.
Starfield has landed…
In a recent interview with Insomniac Games (creators of Marvel’s Spider-Man, among other successful projects), Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard said that Starfield was “a good base of a game to build upon,” referencing the company’s plans for future DLC and additional development for years to come. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of talk of years-long plans for Starfield. In fact, it seems that building a kind of single-player live-service title was one of Bethesda’s main objectives when developing the game.
My question is this: was Starfield screwed over by this idea?
Find me a recent game that billed itself as having a “ten-year plan” or a “five-year roadmap” that actually went the distance. Whether we’re talking about the likes of Anthem, Marvel’s Avengers, or Halo Infinite, many titles have come along promising something like this – only to fail to deliver. Games that genuinely last a decade or more are seldom planned that way; titles like Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto V, or Skyrim are lightning in a bottle. These one-off games succeed for almost unquantifiable reasons – and a massive amount of luck. Corporate planning to replicate that kind of once-in-a-generation level of success has almost never worked. Massive developers like Rockstar have faltered, and even some of the biggest brands and properties on the planet, like Marvel, have been unable to make a “five-year experience” work.
Anthem’s “roadmap” of content that was supposed to be added to the game.
And I can’t help but feel echoes of the likes of Anthem in Starfield. Parts of the game feel barebones and incomplete, as if waiting for future “content drops” and updates to round things out. There are plenty of missions and quests to get stuck into in Starfield, for example, but where are the cosmetics and skins? Why are there so few weapon styles, outfits, skins, and the like? I said when I wrote up my first impressions of Starfield that I was pleased to see the game wasn’t being excessively monetised… but looking at the lack of cosmetic variety and skins, it seems pretty clear that Bethesda plans to add these as paid-for DLC.
The corporation is no stranger to this. In fact, I’d argue that Bethesda is actually one of the guiltiest parties in the entire games industry when it comes to microtransactions – especially in the single-player space. Oblivion’s infamous horse armour DLC in 2006 was one of the most notorious examples of bad value cosmetic DLC in a single-player game, and one of the first to attract mainstream attention. Other companies saw Bethesda essentially getting away with it, and a truly unfortunate trend accelerated.
Oblivion’s horse armour DLC was released in 2006.
At time of writing in October 2023, the only skins available in the game come from expensive pre-order or premium editions of Starfield. That’s already a red flag, in my opinion, and it seems all but certain that future skins will also only be available as paid add-ons.
Starfield could look very different in six months or a year from now, with in-game purchases that could easily push the cost of the complete game closer to £200. Remember that in order to get the currently available skins, and pre-order Shattered Space, players are already having to fork over £100 to Bethesda for Starfield’s premium edition, so £200 when additional skins and cosmetics have been released doesn’t even seem like a stretch. By the time Bethesda finally stops working on Starfield altogether in the years ahead, the full price of the game plus all of its DLC and additional content could run to far more than that.
Skins are currently available as pre-order and special edition bonuses only.
So I’m rescinding my “doesn’t feel excessively monetised” statement from my earlier piece. Starfield feels like a game that’s being primed for additional monetisation – and rumours of paid mods have not escaped my notice, either. Paid mods will have to be the subject of a longer piece one day – but suffice to say for now that I’m not a supporter of them in any way, shape, or form.
Bethesda took a risk by turning Starfield into a single-player live-service title, and while I will say that the “base” version of the game still has a lot on offer – for people who are still interested in Bethesda games and the way they design their quests – I’m not sure it was the right decision. Building a good game with fun gameplay and an engaging story should have been priority number one – but it feels like both of these things took a back seat. Planning for a decade’s worth of add-ons and extra content became Bethesda’s main ambition. I’m not convinced all of these planned pieces of DLC will see the light of day.
This is where skins will appear – when Bethesda is ready to begin selling them.
When I really dig down, Starfield’s biggest issue for me personally isn’t actually that its gameplay feels outdated and uninspired. It’s that the game’s story just didn’t grab me and the worldbuilding was so bland and uninteresting that I didn’t care to spend any more time in it. The world of Starfield feels small, flat, and boring – and when the gameplay backing it up was lacklustre too, I couldn’t find a way to make progress. I’m someone who’ll happily play through some absolutely bog-standard gameplay if I’m enjoying a story or getting lost in a fictional world, but with Starfield offering neither an entertaining story nor an engaging world… sticking with the game lost its appeal.
I looked up spoilers online to see what happens further along Starfield’s main quest. I was bored to tears playing it, but if it picked up later on I thought I might be able to push through to get to the promised moment where the game would finally “get good.” But what I read actually surprised me – and I ended up feeling glad that I didn’t waste any more hours of my life playing through the story.
One of the artefacts at the heart of the game’s story.
What is one of the most basic pillars of storytelling? Any narrative needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. If a story revolves around a big mystery, solving that mystery is absolutely key to making it feel complete. Starfield’s writers chose to ignore this absolutely fundamental rule of narrative construction, and the result is that the game’s main story seems like it comes to a deeply unsatisfying “end.”
Starfield began by setting up a mystery: what is this artefact? What does it do? And who made it? Then the game introduces us to a team of people dedicated to figuring it all out. There are major structural weaknesses on this side of the story – like what anyone involved in Constellation actually does or has been doing for the past thirty years prior to the player character showing up – but that’s somewhat beside the point. After a series of glorified fetch quests that see us chasing different artefacts across the galaxy, Starfield introduces two antagonists and magical powers that we can learn… but then the story ends without explaining anything about what the artefacts were or who created them.
Starfield’s main story has a deeply unsatisfying ending – and the journey to get there isn’t much fun either.
Failing to solve the key mystery at the heart of the narrative, and refusing to even answer the most basic of questions about that mystery, ignores one of the fundamental tenets of storytelling. It makes the whole story – which then begins again in a weird kind of cyclical manner – feel incomplete and frustrating.
It seems to me that this aspect of the game – starting over by “travelling to an alternate reality” – is nothing more than a narrative gimmick to allow Bethesda to put a New Game Plus mode into Starfield.
And why would Bethesda want to add such a feature? None of the company’s previous titles included New Game Plus, after all. Oh, that’s right: because Starfield was built to be a “ten-year experience” rather than a complete game, and New Game Plus feels like an easy way to keep players engaged for longer.
I couldn’t even get through the game once…
So we come full-circle, and I think we can reasonably make the case that Starfield has been harmed in more ways than one by Bethesda’s insistence on planning for the long-term at the expense of the short-term. Maybe Shattered Space, or some additional piece of DLC in the future, will resolve Starfield’s big mystery. And maybe, if that happens, the main story of the game will feel complete and worth experiencing. But if the best possible spin I can put on Starfield is that it’s an incomplete experience that needs additional content to actually feel like its story has a proper ending… that’s not great. It makes it feel no different from dozens of other incomplete live-service games.
I usually avoid live-service titles, and I do so for one basic reason: I don’t like to play an incomplete game. If a film or season of TV ends on a cliffhanger, with promises of a resolution to come next time, that’s one thing. But Starfield isn’t a film or a TV show, it’s a single-player game that shouldn’t depend on future DLC or updates to actually complete its main story.
Ready for boarding?
The longer I’ve sat with Starfield, the further the game has slipped down in my estimation. There are unfavourable comparisons with other recent releases that can’t be avoided, but at its core we’re stuck with a game that feels fundamentally incomplete. As Todd Howard himself admitted, Bethesda made a “base experience” that they intend to build on over the next few years – and that they also expect modders to help with. That might’ve been okay were it not for the outdated and buggy gameplay combined with an uninteresting and bland setting.
So like with other live-service titles, maybe Starfield will be worth revisiting after those promised updates, content drops, and DLC packs have been created. Maybe the “ultra deluxe anniversary edition” will be worth playing in 2030 – so if I live that long, maybe I’ll check it out. But I’ve been wasting my time on a game that, for all of its lofty promises, just isn’t what I’d been expecting. As I said last time: part of that is on me for internalising too much of the hype and excitement that built up in the months before Starfield’s launch. But a lot of the blame lies with Bethesda for creating an uninspiring setting, a bland, incomplete story, and for building a game that feels a decade out of date.
You cannot go that way.
Forget about Starfield becoming a “ten-year experience.” Bethesda needed to catch up on at least ten years worth of improvements and changes in game design and development. Those are the ten years that Bethesda should have been focused on. The company should have been looking at what comparable games in the open-world, action-adventure, and role-playing spaces have been doing since Skyrim launched and worked to incorporate some of those elements into Starfield. Instead, Bethesda took the Skyrim formula, cut out content to introduce later by way of paid DLC and add-ons, and planned for a decade’s worth of content for a game that already feels at least ten years out of date.
I wanted to love Starfield. The game’s overall aesthetic and many of its creative choices looked to create exactly the kind of sci-fi setting that appeals most to me. Blending real-world design elements with some of the sci-fi properties that I remember fondly from years past should have been exactly what I was looking for. I was worried that I was too harsh on Starfield and that I’d been treating the game unfairly or unkindly… but the longer I’ve sat with it the more I’ve seen its “ten-year plan” laid bare. I don’t care for live-services, for incomplete experiences, or for badly-written stories with cheap endings. I think I’m done with Starfield for now – though I will give the caveat that the game could be worth picking up again once its planned add-ons have been released.
Starfield is out now for PC and Xbox Series S & X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
If you’re a regular reader, you might know that I’m an Xbox Game Pass subscriber. I play on PC, not on an Xbox console, but Microsoft’s “Netflix of games” has felt like a good value proposition to me over the past couple of years. I’ve been able to play several big games without having to buy them outright, and in addition Game Pass has introduced me to several titles that I’d never have thought to try for myself. Even though I’m not someone who plays video games every day, I still feel that I get good value for money from Game Pass.
You know there’s a “but” coming, though.
But Game Pass has a problem, and it’s one that might prove tricky to unstick. Although the service includes a good range of titles across different genres, and many brand-new ones join the Game Pass lineup on release day, a lot of these games are incomplete. To use a games industry euphemism: these versions are the “base game” – without any DLC being included.
Game Pass includes a lot of games – but many are incomplete.
There are exceptions to this, such as “game of the year” bundles of titles like Skyrim and Fallout 3 that come packaged with their DLC – but these games, when they exist, tend to be older titles, not brand-new ones. And in the case of Skyrim, while the Game Pass version does include DLC, it’s not the most recent “anniversary edition” that comes with additional content and visual improvements. Figuring out which version of a game is which and what add-ons and DLC come with which one can feel like navigating a maze at times!
This recently came up for me with two games: Starfield and Age of Empires II. I was a huge Age of Empires II fan around the turn of the millennium, and I’ve been thrilled with the Definitive Edition remake that was released a couple of years ago. When developers Forgotten Empires and Xbox Game Studios announced that there was going to be a new piece of DLC for Age of Empires II – one that would bring the original civilisations from the first Age of Empires into the new game – I thought it was something worth checking out.
Promo banner for the Return of Rome DLC.
But on Game Pass, the Return of Rome DLC isn’t included along with Age of Empires II. The only way to play it is to buy it – for the not-so-low price of £10. Even with a Game Pass subscription, it would cost a whopping £80 to buy the Age of Empires Collection – a bundle that includes all four games plus their various DLC packs. If I’m paying a subscription fee every month to access this service and these first-party games, that seems ridiculous and excessive.
Starfield, too, has irked me when it comes to DLC on Game Pass. Bethesda’s space-RPG launched on Game Pass not on “day one,” as was promised, but five days later – with those first five days gated off behind a paywall. Five days of so-called “early” access was only available to players who forked over an additional £35 – and I don’t think that should be acceptable. Too many companies have started charging extra to play their games as soon as they become available, using shady manipulative tricks to convince folks to cough up even more money. But paid “early” access will have to be the subject of a longer article in future.
The only way to get access to Starfield’s “story expansion” on Game Pass is to pay extra.
Also included in Starfield’s expensive £35 add-on on Game Pass was the first piece of planned DLC: Shattered Space. This DLC pack isn’t out yet and most likely won’t arrive until sometime next year, but even for Game Pass subscribers, the only way to get it will be to pay up. Shattered Space is described as a “story expansion” for Starfield; a piece of DLC that will add to the story present in the “base” version of the game. I’m beginning to get tired of this – being charged extra on top of a subscription.
The basic problem is this: we all know that most games in 2023 aren’t complete experiences. With a few exceptions, like Baldur’s Gate 3, most games nowadays are deliberately constructed to be incomplete, and to require DLC and “content packs” to make up for these inbuilt, deliberate deficiencies. When Game Pass only allows players access to the “base game,” what that really means is that it’s a service made up entirely of incomplete experiences.
Baldur’s Gate 3 feels like a rare gem in 2023: a game that’s actually complete without expensive add-ons.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game, and I firmly believe it would still be lauded and held in high esteem even if the games industry wasn’t plagued with these problems. But one factor among many in its success, and one of the reasons why it’s being celebrated by players, is that it’s so rare nowadays to see a fully-complete game that doesn’t require expensive DLC or that doesn’t come bundled with an in-game shop and microtransactions. In a broken, greedy, money-grubbing marketplace, games like that stand out.
Incomplete games have become normalised, and that’s been the case for at least a decade. In 2012, Mass Effect 3 was released – and the “base game” had a whole chunk carved out that was sold as day-one DLC: From Ashes. This content, which was developed alongside the “base game” and perfectly integrated into it, was sold separately by EA for an additional fee. Although it remains a particularly egregious example of this phenomenon, it’s far from the only one. Day-one DLC and cut content are everywhere nowadays.
Mass Effect 3 was a pioneer of cutting out content to sell as DLC.
So if it’s increasingly rare that a “base game” can be considered anywhere close to a complete, well-rounded experience, what does that say about a service like Game Pass? To me, Game Pass feels increasingly like those demo discs that used to come stuck to the front of magazines or in cereal boxes in the ’90s. There’s some great stuff there – but if you want to play more than just the “base” version, you’d better be prepared to fork over some additional cash. Maybe £10 for Age of Empires II DLC seems reasonable to you, but £35 for Starfield DLC that might not be released for another twelve months feels like highway robbery.
Microsoft wants Game Pass to be “the Netflix of games,” and to transform the way players engage with playing games on its platforms. So let’s take the Netflix analogy as a starting point and consider this question: does Netflix charge extra for additional content?
Microsoft wants to make Game Pass the “Netflix of video games.”
Can you imagine logging into Netflix, excited to watch the second season of your favourite show, only to be told that you need to pay an additional fee? For many games, DLC is the equivalent of “Season 2,” continuing the story, rounding out the experience, and even patching out issues with the game in some cases. No video streaming service could get away with only making Season 1 of a TV series or the first film in a trilogy available to watch, with the rest only accessible for an extra fee. That would be ridiculous.
But you see my point, right? It wouldn’t be possible for a video streaming service to only include some films and episodes in its “base version” and expect to get away with charging extra fees to watch the rest. Customers wouldn’t stand for that – so why does Microsoft think it can get away with doing that on Game Pass?
Imagine if Netflix tried to get away with charging extra to watch the second or third season of a series.
I suppose we should make a distinction between different kinds of DLC, in the interest of fairness. Single-use items in online games, in-game currencies, and maybe even some cosmetic items are the kind of things that could still be charged for separately. I’m not suggesting that Game Pass players should get infinite amounts of these things, especially in competitive online multiplayer games.
But for titles like Starfield with its single-player DLC, and even for Age of Empires II with its new story campaign and factions, I really do believe that these should be included in the cost of Game Pass. What are we paying Microsoft for if all we’re getting are incomplete experiences; games that will become less and less complete over time? The price of Game Pass should go toward the cost of developing DLC for these titles, especially since it’s taken as a monthly charge. There’s no better definition of a “recurring revenue stream” than that.
This is all about money, at the end of the day.
So this was a bit of a rant, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up for some time now. While I don’t think it’s fair to ask for every single title to include all purchasable items as part of Game Pass, I absolutely believe that single-player titles and big expansion packs should be covered. The “base game” hasn’t felt like a full or complete experience for a long time, so when Game Pass only offers that, it feels less like a subscription service and more like an expensive demo disc.
At the very least, I’d like to see Microsoft’s first-party releases bring their major expansion packs and DLC to Game Pass. If I were to fantasize, I’d say that cosmetic items in single-player games, small content packs like cars in racing games or new guns in shooters should also be included as well.
This is something Microsoft will have to deal with sooner or later, because players aren’t going to be pleased if they have to keep forking over additional fees on top of their Game Pass subscription. If I have to pay £35 to get Starfield’s unreleased DLC, why even bother subscribing at that point? I might as well buy the “base game” right now and wait for the DLC to go on sale.
The Game Pass subscription service is available now for players on PC and Xbox game consoles. All titles discussed above are the copyright of their respective developer, publisher, and/or studio. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Minor spoilers are present for some early missions in Starfield.
A strange feeling hit me yesterday. I’d taken a break from Starfield for a few days after writing up my first impressions of the game, but I booted it up again to give it another shot at getting me immersed in its sci-fi world. This was, after all, a game I’d been excited to play and had been looking forward to. But while I was playing Starfield and feeling underwhelmed by some of its basic quests and unimpressive exploration… I realised that I’d rather be playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I was planning out character ideas in my head, thinking about how to approach some early-game quests and encounters that I was unprepared for the first time around, and I even found myself more interested in writing about that game than I was in actually playing Starfield.
This got me thinking about Bethesda, and in particular the way in which the company’s game design and creation feels… well, stagnant. Starfield, while an impressive technical achievement in many ways, also feels like a game whose core mechanics and systems haven’t really improved or moved on in more than two decades – and while that’s clearly sitting right with a lot of Bethesda fans and giving them a ton of enjoyment, it feels disappointing to me.
An empty captain’s chair.
Starfield is a Bethesda game. It’s “Skyrim in space.” And those two expressions simultaneously encompass everything Starfield fans love about the game… and everything that critics dislike about it. For the first time since I played Morrowind more than twenty years ago, I find myself wrangling with a difficult question: do I actually like Bethesda games? Or to be more accurate: are Bethesda games still enjoyable twenty years later when the formula, designs, and core gameplay mechanics haven’t really changed?
See, Starfield isn’t just “Skyrim in space.” It’s also “Oblivion in space,” “Fallout 3 in space,” and even “Morrowind in space.” Although more than twenty years have passed since we were first sitting down to play Morrowind, not a lot has changed in terms of the way a Bethesda game feels. And that’s a double-edged sword, because that familiarity is clearly something that fans adore. That style of gameplay has its audience – and it’s a big one. How else do we explain Skyrim still being popular almost twelve years later?
Morrowind was released on PC and Xbox in 2002.
But that familiarity is, at least for me, the beginning of Starfield’s undoing. The structure of a Bethesda game – with an optional main quest and plenty of side-missions to get stuck into – felt incredibly innovative in 2002, but doesn’t any more. And when many of those quests are incredibly basic, offering little if any choice of how to approach them, again it feels like Bethesda’s game design has become stagnant. Quests in Starfield operate in functionally the same way as quests did in Morrowind – and every other mainline Bethesda game since. You have two basic variants: go to place, press button to collect/interact with item, the end. Or: go to place full of enemies, kill enemies, the end.
During an early-game mission in Starfield, I found myself at a facility teeming with nameless “spacers.” This base felt no different from the dozen or so other bases I’d cleared out earlier in my playthrough, and even though it was a named quest location, it felt incredibly samey in terms of its design and its loot. Stealth was an option – but not an especially good one, as taking down one enemy would alert all the others in the vicinity. There were no real puzzles to solve, aside from picking a couple of locks, and after exploring the entire place, listening to a couple of audio logs, and talking to one NPC, I’d claimed my prize and was blasting off to the next place.
Fighting pirates in Starfield.
As I explored the facility that I was infiltrating (alright, attacking) I kept encountering interesting-looking items that I just couldn’t interact with at all. Computers that couldn’t be powered on. Gauges and switches that couldn’t be spun or flicked. Buttons that couldn’t be pressed. There was no environmental storytelling nor any way to use the environment to my advantage. I couldn’t, for example, hack into the base’s computers and set turrets to target the spacers. I couldn’t vent toxic gas into a room to knock them out. There wasn’t an alternate route to the clearly-marked destination that I could have used to sneak past the guards. In short: it was a Bethesda quest from a Bethesda game.
And I remember this exact criticism from the Morrowind days. “You’ll come across a fishing rod that you can’t use to fish,” said one reviewer at the time, using that example as a way to call out the superficial world that Morrowind offered. Because I got so hooked in by the story, the characters, the lore, and the world-building… I always felt such criticisms were silly. The world was rich and deep in story terms, even if mechanically and in terms of gameplay it wasn’t. That was good enough for me in 2002 – but it doesn’t feel good enough any more in 2023.
This computer setup (which is duplicated in many bases and locations across Starfield’s galaxy) is set dressing. It can’t be touched or interacted with in any way.
A lot of folks are playing and loving Starfield. A friend of mine, who was even more hyped for the game than I was, seems to be having a whale of a time – and I’m genuinely thrilled for them and for everyone else who’s enjoying it. But I feel like I’m watching a New Year’s Eve party through the window while standing on the cold street outside; everyone else is having fun, but I’m not.
I keep waiting for Starfield to “click.” I keep waiting for that moment where I’ll think “oh, I get it now,” and the fun can actually begin. But almost twenty-five hours in, it hasn’t. There are whole games that are shorter than that, games that get going from the very first moment and tell a wonderful story in a relatively short span of time. My pick for 2021’s game of the year was Kena: Bridge of Spirits, an indie title that was visually beautiful, emotional, and a ton of fun to play. But my playthrough of that game lasted barely twelve hours, and in that time I explored the game world, fell in love with its characters, and dragged it out as much as possible because I just didn’t want the experience to end.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits was 2021’s game of the year.
I’ve heard other critics and commentators say that Starfield doesn’t “get good” until around the six-hour mark, the twelve-hour mark, or even beyond that. But… if it takes that long for the game to get going, I don’t really consider that to be a selling-point. It’s often true that a game gets more interesting to play as the campaign goes on; your character levels up and gains more skills and abilities, giving you more options in some cases. But the basic gameplay still has to be balanced and enjoyable during those first few hours! That’s crucial to player retention. If the reason I’m not enjoying Starfield after twenty-five hours and bringing my character up to level 18 is because the game “doesn’t get good” until later… well, how much longer am I going to have to wait to have a good time?
I don’t really think that’s the issue, though. Levelling up my character and doing those basic looting and fetching activities just don’t hold the appeal they once did. The real reason for that, I fear, is that game design has moved beyond what Bethesda and its Creation Engine are capable of.
Standing on a random planet with a spaceship landing to my left and an enemy base to my right.
The world of Starfield feels regressive and, to me, more akin to Morrowind than Fallout 4 or Skyrim. Shops never close, even when it’s the middle of the night, and their NPC proprietors stand or sit behind their counters 24/7. When I aim the first-person camera down to the ground, I can’t see my character’s feet or body; I’m just a floating camera orb. Enemies and NPCs don’t feel reactive – you can run away from them and they’ll just forget you existed two minutes later, even if you’ve murdered all their companions and shot them in the face.
And the bugs. Oh god, the bugs. Starfield probably is Bethesda’s “least-buggy release ever,” as has been repeatedly claimed. But “least-buggy” doesn’t mean “there are zero bugs,” and claiming to be the least-buggy Bethesda game is like claiming to be the sewer with the fewest turds. I’ve seen dozens of bugs across my playthrough, including enemies able to shoot through doors and walls, NPCs clipping through solid objects, characters levitating, and items disappearing through the environment or floating away. There’s one particularly annoying bug where I’ll be piloting my spaceship but every crew member on board will repeatedly spout the same handful of lines of dialogue – as if the game thinks I just walked up to them.
Just one of many bugs I’ve encountered. Not game-breaking, but certainly immersion-breaking.
Every time Starfield has a chance at getting me to feel a crumb of immersion in its sci-fi future, something comes along that rips it away again. Maybe it’s walking into a cabin on my ship to see one of my crew members clipping through a box. Maybe it’s realising that a shopkeeper doesn’t have a life outside of the few seconds I spend in his always-open shop. Maybe it’s landing on a supposedly “unexplored” planet or moon only to find two spacer bases, a mining outpost, and another spaceship landing right next to me. But I can’t go more than a few minutes without something in Starfield reminding me that I’m playing a video game – and a video game that feels years out of date.
After taking part in yet another quest that didn’t seem to be any different from any of the others I’ve tried, I kind of felt myself hit the wall. Should I keep pressing on, following one uninspiring story after another in an empty world that I couldn’t give a shit about? Should I keep trying to pretend that these last-gen, waxy-skinned Madame Tussauds rejects are “people,” even as their dead eyes and ridiculous faces break what little immersion I can find? Should I keep waiting for Starfield to “get good?”
A pair of NPCs.
Setting my own feelings aside, I wonder what lessons can be learned from Starfield from Bethesda’s point of view. As the company begins to develop new entries in The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, as well as potential DLC for Starfield, what should the key takeaways be? As I asked at the beginning: where does Bethesda go from here?
Despite how I feel – and how you may feel, too, if you happen to agree with me – Starfield has been well-received by Bethesda fans. The game had six million players shortly after launch, making it the biggest Bethesda release ever. And it’s racked up decent reviews on platforms like Steam and Metacritic, with the positive reviews outweighing the negative ones from both professional critics and players alike. There’s a market for this kind of game, then… so Bethesda doesn’t need to change anything. Right?
Starfield’s ratings on Metacritic as of mid-September 2023.
I look at Starfield – and by extension, Bethesda games in general – the same way I’ve looked at Nintendo games since the mid-2000s. Nintendo threw in the towel and gave up on trying to compete with PlayStation and Xbox on power and graphics, focusing instead on carving out its own niche. Nintendo games rarely if ever compete with other studios in terms of things like visuals or scale, and yet it’s found success with 2D games, retro games, kids’ games, smaller and more simplistic games, and so on. The company has gone from strength to strength with the Wii and the Switch – with a bit of a blip during the short-lived Wii U era!
Bethesda may just be going down a similar path. Instead of trying to keep up with open-world developers like Rockstar or role-playing studios like Larian, Bethesda is sticking to what’s worked in the past. Instead of developing new technologies and innovating, the company is doubling- and tripling-down on its existing technology, knowing that its fanbase will forgive a degree of bugginess and jankiness. Instead of learning from what other companies have done with tech like procedural generation, Bethesda is content to muddle through and do things its own way.
Shops in Starfield never close, and shopkeepers never leave their posts.
And who am I to say that’s a bad thing? I don’t like every Nintendo game that comes out, but their heavy-hitters are still worth turning up for. Whether it’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Super Mario Odyssey, or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Nintendo knows what its fans want and serves them just enough of it to keep them coming back. Are those games innovative masterpieces that push boundaries and drive gaming forward? No… but do they need to be?
Did Starfield need to be?
I bought into too much of the excitement for Starfield and internalised too much of the hype. That one’s on me, and after playing games for more than thirty years I should’ve known better than to place any new release on such a pedestal. But there’s also a lesson here for Bethesda – one that the company should have learned already from similar experiences in the past! Over-hyping a game and being frightened of telling players “no” can lead to excessively high expectations and ultimately disappointment. That’s part of the Starfield problem. The Starfield showcase earlier this year was great, but what came after it should have shut down speculation, explained clearly the boundaries that would be present, and done more to lower sky-high expectations. Over-selling a game might lead to a temporary boost in sales, but it’s almost never worth it in the long-run.
Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard.
Beyond just marketing, though, there are questions for Bethesda in terms of the fundamentals of development and game design. Does the company have both the ability and the desire to keep up with its competitors? If so… why didn’t we see that in Starfield?
Procedural generation has been able to create massive, expansive worlds for a long time. So why are Starfield’s planets restricted to tiny, non-contiguous landing zones? Minecraft generated massive worlds with varied biomes more than a decade ago, and No Man’s Sky took procedural generation to space all the way back in 2016. The same for spaceflight: why can’t I fly my ship from one planet to the next in the same solar system?
My customised spaceship.
Look at open-world games like Grand Theft Auto V – which is now a decade old. That game’s linear missions at least offered some variety in terms of the way they played. Why does every quest in Starfield feel functionally the same? Where’s the diversity of items to at least make the looting side of the game feel worthwhile?
When I explore a city in Starfield that’s supposedly the capital of humanity’s extrasolar colonies, why does it feel so lifeless and empty? For all its problems – and my god were there problems – Cyberpunk 2077 at least managed to create the feel of a bustling city, replete with skyscrapers, traffic, and countless individual NPCs.
New Atlantis – the biggest city ever made for a Bethesda game – feels small and empty.
These are just some of the areas where Starfield feels deficient. And my question isn’t “how will Bethesda fix them?” but rather… does Bethesda even consider these things problems that need to be fixed? Or is the company content to take this formula and repeat it yet again in its next title? If so, will that be good enough for Bethesda fans when The Elder Scrolls VI rolls around in 2028? Or when Fallout 5 graces our screens in the 2030s?
The answer is a solid “maybe.”
So where does Bethesda go from here? The way I see it, there are two paths open to the company. One sees it continuing to double-down on its existing technology and design philosophy, becoming “the Nintendo of role-playing games,” where graphical fidelity, quest design, characters, and more are all a couple of generations behind. Abandoning innovation in this way will probably lead to The Elder Scrolls VI being referred to as “Starfield in a fantasy setting,” whenever that game is ready!
Another bug that I encountered during my playthrough.
Alternatively, Bethesda could recognise the deficiencies in its technologies and processes, look around at what other games in the action/adventure, open-world, and role-playing spaces have been doing over the past few years, and try to catch up. Realistically this almost certainly means dumping the Creation Engine in order to create or license something more powerful that can really stand up to the rigours of modern game development.
After trying to give Starfield a fair shot but finding it came up short, I know what I’d rather see. But given Starfield’s critical and commercial success, perhaps I’m in the minority here. It seems that millions of players are absolutely fine with playing “just another Bethesda game” in a different setting, and if that’s the case in 2023, who’s to say it will change by the time the next Bethesda title is ready? Like Nintendo, the company clearly has a dedicated fanbase who are willing to overlook and even embrace its flaws. I thought I was one of those fans… but Starfield has shown me that I’m not.
Starfield is out now for PC and Xbox Series S & X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: While there are no major story spoilers for Starfield, minor spoilers for the main quest and a handful of side-quests are present.
I promised that I’d share my first impressions of Starfield as soon as possible, and with the game finally launching for us plebs who didn’t fork over £100 to get “early” access, I’ve belatedly had the chance to jump in and try it for myself. I’m basing my impressions of the game on approximately twenty hours of playtime, in which I’ve started but not completed the main quest, created a character, worked on my spaceship, undertaken a handful of side-missions and fetch quests, and landed on about twenty different planets. There’s no way I can reasonably “review” a game as large and long as Starfield without beating a single questline, so I’m calling this piece my “first impressions” of the game.
Starfield’s showcase earlier this summer was fantastic, and the game rocketed up the list to become my most-anticipated launch of the year. The idea of playing an open-galaxy adventure with all of the fantastic writing and quest design of a Bethesda game combined with spaceflight, spaceship building, and exploration, and set in a new fictional universe with designs that drew inspiration from NASA… it all seemed too good to be true. A friend of mine suggested to me a couple of months ago that Starfield “might be the best game that either of us will ever play.” Try as I might to avoid the hype, there’s no denying how excited I was for Starfield.
Promo poster for Starfield.
Hype can be detrimental to any game if not properly handled, something I commented on shortly before the release of 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077. I said then that games publishers and their marketing teams need to do a better job at reining in speculation, and that there are ways to let players down gently, redirecting the conversation, if necessary, away from features that won’t be part of a game. The hype train for Starfield definitely got unwieldy, and I fear that Bethesda ended up over-promising.
Let’s get the headline out of the way right now: Starfield is undeniably a good game… but it doesn’t always make good on some of its loftier promises and ambitions. It brings a lot to the table, but several of its key features and systems feel barebones and underdone, especially when compared to other titles in a similar space, meaning that there’s not a lot to offer in terms of longer-term play or replayability. Thus far, the game’s main story has failed to grab me following what I felt was a pretty rushed beginning, and customisation options for both the player character and their spaceship aren’t at the level I was hoping for. There are also some notable bugs that slipped through, in spite of promises that Starfield would be Bethesda’s “least-buggy release ever,” and graphics that feel outdated in some areas.
The city of New Atlantis.
That being said, Starfield gets a lot right. The game’s art style and overall aesthetic is exactly what I was looking for, drawing on real-world space agencies like NASA and retro sci-fi properties from the ’70s and ’80s that I grew up with. There’s some genuinely enjoyable gunplay – a first for a Bethesda title. Voice acting is solid across the board. And while I don’t feel that the game has really managed to suck me in – at least, not yet – it still manages to evoke at least some of those feelings of being a space captain in a sci-fi world that it was aiming for.
I think the best thing to do at this point is to break this article into segments. Each segment will tackle one aspect of Starfield’s gameplay, and then we’ll bring it all together at the end for a conclusion. I’ll try to avoid major plot spoilers – though I’m yet to complete the main quest or any faction questline, so there shouldn’t be anything massive in the mix.
Exploration:
Landing on a planet’s surface.
Exploring in Starfield is not what I expected it would be. After landing on the surface of a planet, you’re restricted to a “landing zone” that takes about ten to twelve minutes to reach the boundary of while traversing on foot. No, despite what you may have heard, a landing zone is not “the same size as Skyrim!” For the most part, I don’t think the size of a landing zone is a particular problem, and I’d wager that most players – though by no means all – won’t bother to trek as far as the invisible wall. But that in itself is saying something – because there’s not a lot to do in a lot of these places, and much of what is on offer gets repetitive very quickly.
As an aside about invisible walls: this could have been handled better. An in-game explanation could have been found, allowing Starfield to technobabble its way to an excuse for why it isn’t possible to roam too far from where your ship landed. Something about “needing to stay in communications range,” or words to that effect, for example. Instead, the first time you hit an invisible wall it’s pretty jarring – you’re simply told that “you cannot go that way,” much like you were as far back as Oblivion.
This looks familiar.
In the roughly twenty hours I’ve spent with Starfield, I’ve encountered absolutely identical locations and buildings on different planets on multiple occasions. Within each “abandoned mine,” enemies spawn in the same place, much of the loot is identical, and the layout of the structure is the same. These so-called “points of interest” on the surface of planets are copied-and-pasted from one to the next, and I’m already bored of that after just a few hours.
Imagine if you visited three identical dungeons in Skyrim, and knew that the fourth one would also have the same enemies in the same places and the same basic loot to grab. You’d start to lose interest pretty quickly, right? Maybe I’ve been particularly unlucky, and maybe there are many more of these randomised locations that I’m yet to encounter. I hope so, but even if that’s the case, the fact that these structures – and everything within – can be repeated at all isn’t exactly a good look.
This was one of my big fears about Starfield from the moment Bethesda began talking of planets being made up of “tiles,” and I’m disappointed to see it come to pass.
Discovering another “deserted biotics lab” soon feels repetitive.
One of the early main quest missions is even set at one of these copy-and-paste locations. That actually shocked me when I realised it, because I’d already explored not one but two identical “abandoned mines” on other planets prior to playing this main quest mission. I would have expected at the very least to see locations connected to main quests and faction quests being wholly unique, and again this feels like a disappointment.
One of the things that appealed to me about Starfield was the idea of being able to go “where no man has gone before,” and setting foot on an uncharted world for the first time. But I can’t do that – at least not from what I’ve seen so far. Every single landing zone I’ve touched down at has at least two of these copy-and-paste structures, and no matter how many times I take off again and pick a different spot… they’re always there. Also, every single time I land on a planet, another ship lands a few metres away from mine moments later. There’s no opportunity to feel like a bona fide explorer – the first person to set foot in this strange alien landscape. No matter where you go, someone else has beaten you to it.
A structure on a random planet.
Feeling like I’m at the forefront of this mission of exploration like a Starfleet officer was one of the things I was most keen to experience in Starfield, and the way that the game has handled this hasn’t been great. I literally tried landing at more than fifteen different sites on a single planet, just trying to find one that didn’t have any pre-built structures or spaceship landing sites. But alas.
That’s not to say that there’d be much point in landing at such a site. Starfield is incredibly stingy with its planetary resources, with only a handful of minerals to collect that are scattered across a wide area. With most resources not being worth many credits, any kind of mining or resource-gathering is pretty much out of the question as an in-game career. It’s easier and more efficient to kill random enemies and loot their bases rather than trying to mine or collect minerals and resources.
Mining iron doesn’t yield much profit.
Much was made at the showcase about gravity, and how different planets will have different levels of gravity. As far as I can see, gravity in Starfield affects one thing: how high you can jump. How fast you can walk or run seems entirely unaffected by gravity, as are shooting and carrying capacity. I haven’t encountered any zero-G sections of gameplay yet, though, so those could spice things up a bit.
Different planets can have different environmental hazards: radiation, heat, and even things like scalding rain or toxic gases. For the most part, the spacesuit and helmet that I’ve had equipped for the bulk of my playthrough thus far seem to be adequate, though my character picked up a couple of environmental injuries early on. I’m not sure if there’s more to this, but I’ve landed on frozen icy planets and even the surface of Venus using the same equipment and I’ve really not noticed a difference.
The map.
Having a usable map has become an essential feature in any game with large levels – but Starfield bucks this trend. The available map is good enough on the surface of random planets, but utterly useless for navigating cities and settlements.
The map highlights points of interest, and it’s possible to fast travel to any that have been discovered. But god forbid you try to find a particular shop or building in New Atlantis! The map doesn’t have that level of detail for some inexplicable reason.
Spaceflight:
A custom spaceship takes to the skies!
This ought to be nice and short: there isn’t any. There’s functionally no spaceflight in this game whatsoever. Remember being told “if you can see it, you can go there?” Well, you don’t get to actually fly your ship to your destination. You can’t take off from wherever you landed and manually fly to the moon or to the next planet over. No. The only way to travel from one location to the next is to fast-travel from either the map or mission menu.
I fully expected that travelling from one solar system to another would work this way. Who wants to sit around for ages flying through interstellar space, right? But within a single system – and especially to fly from a planet to its moon or from a space station to the planet it’s orbiting – I genuinely expected that I’d be able to take my customised spaceship and actually, y’know… fly it.
Flying near a planet doesn’t mean you can fly to a planet.
Instead, Starfield drops you and your ship in a little pocket of space, a little bubble. You can fly around within that bubble, talk to any nearby ships, dock with space stations, and the like. But you can’t do anything else, and you’re trapped within that bubble until you open the map menu and select another destination. There’s no option to fly from one planet or moon to a neighbouring one, which is just a disappointment.
What’s the point of building a custom spaceship if you can’t actually get to pilot it for any significant length of time? Sure, there are some combat encounters in space that are tense, and it’s a bit of fun the first few times you get scanned for contraband, hail a friendly ship, or dock with someone. But there’s not a lot of longevity in most of those activities, and the decision to basically offer no actual spaceflight in a space game… it’s an odd one to say the least!
The view from the cockpit.
Some missions operate the same way. After choosing an assignment from a “mission board” located near a spaceport, you’ll be tasked with some relatively mundane job in exchange for credits. One that I chose involved delivering a shipment of jewellery from one planet to another. But to call these “missions” is massively overstating it!
After selecting the task I wanted from the mission board, the quest was available in the menu. But I didn’t have to go anywhere to collect the cargo; it magically appeared on my ship instantaneously. All I had to do was board my ship, select the destination planet from the map screen, and away I went. I mistakenly assumed that I’d have to talk to someone or at the very least interact with a screen in order to transfer the cargo and complete the assignment – but no! The mission was automatically marked as complete the very second my ship touched down. I didn’t even need to get out of my seat, and the entire thing took less than a minute from choosing the task to marking it as complete and receiving my reward. Hardly an interactive experience – and while such tasks may be useful for making a bunch of credits in short order, it wasn’t fun and it wasn’t immersive.
The view from the cockpit.
Maybe this is more of a personal taste thing, but I really dislike the way Starfield presents its heads-up display while piloting a spaceship. I found the HUD to be incredibly cumbersome, especially in first-person mode, and it got in the way of the immersion of being a space captain or space pilot. Displaying these little transparent boxes on top of in-game computer screens and monitors really detracts from the piloting experience.
Even in third-person mode, the HUD is still obtrusive and takes up a lot of real estate on the screen. I’d have loved to see Starfield make actual use of those screens and displays in the cockpit, as that would make for a much more engaging and interactive experience. Offering players a choice, at least, with a simplified HUD or smaller HUD as options would have been nice, too.
Graphics:
Parts of Starfield can look decent.
If Starfield had been released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, I’d have said it looked great. And some of its backdrops and vistas look pretty. Seeing a planet from space or seeing a landscape stretching off into the distance are genuinely great moments, and they’re rendered well. But when you start looking at things up close, a lot of Starfield’s next-gen trappings fall away.
The main area of complaint here is the characters’ faces. Eyes are dead and faces flip-flop from being totally blank and expressionless to having almost comically exaggerated movements, then back again. Every character, regardless of race or age, looks to be about twenty-five years old, with smooth skin and perfect teeth. Practically all characters are the same height, and most are the same build, too.
Starfield vs. Baldur’s Gate 3.
The image above is one I believe offers a fair comparison. On the left we have the character of Sam Coe from Starfield, and on the right, Gale from Baldur’s Gate 3 – wearing a similar hat to make comparing them easier and fairer! I picked these two characters because they have a similar look, and are both major NPCs and companion characters in their respective games. You can tell at a glance which looks better and more lifelike, and that’s without even seeing them moving or being animated. In short, Bethesda has fallen a long way behind when it comes to faces – and this comparison proves it.
“But graphics don’t matter!” goes the frequently-heard retort. And I agree to an extent – many games deliberately employ art direction that isn’t intended to be realistic, going down a “retro” route of pixels and polygons or choosing a cartoony aesthetic, just to give two examples. But Starfield is trying to be realistic – and at least in terms of faces and character models, it misses the mark by a country mile. Games in the same role-playing space by other developers look so much better than Starfield, which is, at best, a polished and shinier version of Fallout 4.
Story:
Sarah Morgan, head of the Constellation organisation.
Thus far, I don’t feel particularly engaged with either Starfield’s main story or the world that the game is trying to build. In true Bethesda style, the player character is some kind of “chosen one,” able to see visions when interacting with mysterious artefacts. But the game’s opening act felt pretty rushed, with my nameless miner picking up an artefact and then being whisked away by Constellation mere minutes later. I get that Bethesda needs to make this section of the game as curtailed as possible so it doesn’t drag too much on repeat playthroughs, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there wasn’t much explanation provided for why my character was essentially given a free spaceship and shoved off into the cosmos.
The artefacts themselves are pretty bland to look at, and the visions, while certainly mysterious, don’t really offer much else. I don’t feel compelled to keep pushing to figure out what the artefacts are or where they’ve come from, and while a decent ending or a good explanation could certainly reframe this aspect of the game’s story and make it more interesting, that hasn’t happened for me yet.
One of the artefacts that are at the core of the main story.
In terms of storytelling, the side-missions I’ve played so far didn’t feel especially interactive or player-led. On one occasion I stumbled upon a farmstead that was under attack by spacers, and as the mission unfolded I had to recruit other local families to join in the defence of their system from these raiders. But at every stage, the mission felt like it was being organised and led by the very people I was supposedly helping. They discovered the locations I needed to attack, they planned the mission, and it was at their direction that I did, well, everything. I didn’t even have the basic choice to try to do the mission through stealth; a full-frontal attack was literally the only option.
What this meant, when the dust settled and the questline was complete, is that I didn’t really feel like I’d done anything different. Attacking this group of spacers, killing them, and looting their base scarcely felt any different from attacking, killing, and looting random bases on other worlds, and I felt that my character really didn’t engage much with the quest-giver beyond listening to his plan and following orders. As the questline wrapped up and the quest-giver showered my character with praise for defeating the spacers… the whole thing just felt rather hollow.
Scale:
New Atlantis, the bustling metropolis at the heart of the United Colonies.
Before Starfield launched, I wrote a piece here on the website about my concerns surrounding the sense of scale that a game like this needs to have. I zeroed in on two factors: the amount of content relative to the size of the map, and the way other games manage to convey the feeling that players are taking part in a story that only scratches the surface of a much larger world, one that exists beyond the confines of the playable area.
Parts of Starfield feel… small. Exploring New Atlantis – supposedly the biggest city that Bethesda has ever created – feels akin to walking around a small town, not the capital city of a futuristic humanity. There’s no sense of scale, no ambience, and the city doesn’t feel believable. Parts of it are literally deserted, and the handful of people who are milling around are more often than not nameless “citizens” with nothing to say.
A citizen. He’s busy at the moment.
The aforementioned lack of spaceflight also cuts into this sense of scale. Because Starfield allows you to hop from one planet to the next by opening a menu, there’s no feeling that you’ve actually travelled, or that the destination you’ve reached is far away from the spaceport that you departed from. What should be a vast, open galaxy feels small as a result.
Doubling-down on this feeling are the copy-and-paste locations present on planet surfaces outside of the main settlements. I truly can’t believe how many repeat locations I’ve encountered in such a short span of time, and this is again something that really drags Starfield down.
Customisation Part 1: Character Creation:
The character creation screen.
The character creator in Starfield has left me with mixed feelings. Firstly, there seems to be a pretty big difference between the way your character looks when initially creating them and how they actually appear during gameplay. Maybe this is due to lighting or other effects, but I felt my character looked noticeably worse after exiting the character creator. And having spent ages working on them… that didn’t feel great.
There are some great options within the character creator to represent different body types – but this isn’t as extensive as it could be. You can choose whether to be thin, muscular, or fat, for example, or any combination of those three things, but not your character’s height. There are plenty of options for various skin types, including things like vitiligo, freckles, and wrinkles, but very few hair and facial hair options. When it comes to reflecting diverse hair types… that’s poor.
There aren’t a lot of hairstyles, facial hair styles, or eye colours.
Eye colour is likewise very limited. Baldur’s Gate 3, which was released last month, and even 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077 offer far richer and more detailed character creators, and I think it’s a shame that Bethesda hasn’t really made much progress here since Fallout 4. And speaking of Fallout 4: several of the hairstyles seem to be lifted directly from that game, retaining their ’50s-inspired look that doesn’t particularly suit Starfield’s retro-sci-fi future.
As a quick comparison, Cyberpunk 2077 has 35 hair colours and more than 50 hairstyles to Starfield’s 23 hair colours and 40 hairstyles – an absolutely massive difference considering it’s almost three years old and was released on last-generation hardware. And Baldur’s Gate 3 has well over 100 colours and more than 85 styles to choose from, showing what a modern game is really capable of in that department.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has far more hairstyle, hair colour, and eye colour options.
What’s the point in Starfield offering 100 ways to reshape your nose or cheekbones – things that are barely perceptible in-game – while only offering a handful of eye colours and hairstyles? These things go a long way to making a character feel personalised and unique, and when there are so few options, within a matter of minutes you’re likely to be running into NPCs who share some part of your character’s appearance or who look alike. Given the aforementioned issues with the way the game renders faces, the fact that many NPCs look similar to one another is verging on immersion-breaking.
The Starfield showcase really played up the various backgrounds and traits that are available during character creation. And to the game’s credit, these traits and backgrounds are varied and interesting. However, I would say that in my twenty hours with the game, the only place where my character’s background has even been mentioned so far was in the intro/tutorial sequence right at the beginning. Now, there are likely to be more opportunities for random lines of dialogue to appear, but so far I haven’t seen very many.
Backgrounds don’t seem to have much of an impact on gameplay.
I picked the “Raised Enlightened” trait, one of three potential religious affiliations. Partly I did so because in-game text promised access to a chest in New Atlantis, of which there seems to be one for each religion, and I figured that the chest may contain items that could prove useful in the early game. This chest was a complete nothing-burger, offering a handful of health packs and four “books” – which are a couple of pages long at most.
Another trait I chose was “UC Native,” meaning that my character was born in the United Colonies, one of two major factions in the game. While this has some bonuses when completing missions, it doesn’t really come with a lot of perks. For instance, I was told early on that I’m not actually a “citizen” of the United Colonies – presumably so I can have access to the same questline to become a citizen as players who didn’t choose this option. But then… what was the point of choosing this trait? It doesn’t seem to have affected my character in a meaningful way.
Customisation Part 2: Spaceships:
An example of a customised spaceship.
Spaceship building was one of the parts of Starfield that I was most excited about. I’ve loved the idea of creating my very own spaceship ever since I played the likes of Star Trek: Starship Creator in the late ’90s, and being able to not only build my own ship, but pilot it, take it into combat, and get out of my chair and freely walk around the interior are all aspects that held huge appeal.
The ship creator is fun – but it requires a significant investment of credits to get started with, and is a bit more finicky than I’d hoped to see. Some components are incompatible with one another, there are limitations on where some parts can be placed and what they can connect to, and the way weapons have to be manually “assigned” is cumbersome and annoying.
Assigning weapons to a spaceship.
That being said, building my own ship is about as much fun as I realistically expected to have. It isn’t perfect, and in an ideal world there’s a lot I’d add (and a few things I’d remove) to make the experience even more enjoyable. But there are plenty of colour options, and the fact that ships can be assembled in a range of configurations is great. I’d like to see more components and modules – but I don’t think I’ve seen or unlocked all that the game has to offer, so it’s conceivable that I’ll come across more options as I progress.
As I said a few times before Starfield launched, if spaceship interiors could be customised, Bethesda would have said so. While I was still crossing my fingers, this didn’t feel like a realistic prospect as the game edged closer to launch. Even though I’d resigned myself to this reality… it’s still disappointing, especially considering that Starfield does allow for interior designing and decorating in outposts and houses. Would it have really been much more complicated to add this already-present feature to spaceships, too?
Spaceship interiors can’t be repainted or customised.
My spaceship doesn’t feel like “mine.” There’s a half-eaten sandwich on a table that my character didn’t bite. There are notes on the whiteboard in my “captain’s cabin” that I didn’t write (and have no idea what they mean). Although my spaceship is a fetching shade of pink on the outside, the walls inside are a generic white colour. I can’t even repaint hatches and doors, nor choose the colour of the furniture.
While it is possible to drop items aboard the ship and have them remain where they fall, this particular mechanic has literally not been improved since Morrowind. It’s not possible to precisely position items, meaning I can’t even set the table for dinner with a knife and fork. For me, these things are all part of the immersion – and when they aren’t present, my ship just feels bland and generic, and not personal at all.
I hope you weren’t planning on giving your ship a long name!
A spaceship can be renamed at will, which is great, but names are limited to a scant fourteen characters. “Enterprise-D” fits, but “Millennium Falcon” doesn’t. I’ve no idea why Bethesda has been so stingy with the character limit here, as it cuts off a good deal of ship naming possibilities.
And while we’re on the subject of names: remember Todd Howard telling you that Vasco, the robot companion, could say your name and the name of your ship? Well, that hasn’t happened for me yet, despite taking Vasco all over the galaxy and having him accompany me on a number of missions. Not sure if there’s some hidden requirement to unlock this, but if there is, I haven’t found it yet. I didn’t give my character some kind of horribly obscure name, and I was looking forward to hearing this robotic voice say it; it’s another addition to the immersion. Considering what’s possible with text-to-speech nowadays, there’s no reason why Vasco should be limited to a handful of pre-recorded names.
Customisation Part 3: Outfits and Loot:
Six spacesuits available to purchase from a vendor.
I miss the days when you could mix and match outfits. Clothing in Starfield comes by way of whole costumes, with no option to change shoes, pants, shirts, and the like. There are hats that can be equipped individually, but that’s it. I find this to not only be disappointing, as it seriously cuts into the customisation and role-playing aspect of the game, but also a pretty big regressive step.
As far back as Morrowind, Bethesda games let you choose individual pieces of clothing. Shoes, trousers, tops, and even individual pieces of armour were all separate and could be mixed and matched at will. Even though that game is more than twenty years old, it seems like it had more customisation options when it comes to apparel.
Some defeated enemies don’t drop much loot.
In addition, Starfield doesn’t appear to have a huge array of clothing options to choose from. I think I’ve seen a couple of dozen different outfits, maybe, across my playthrough so far – including from several different vendors. And while looting outposts and enemies, I keep picking up the same ones over and over again. At one point I literally had 20 of the same spacesuit.
And this is true of other items, too. Even if you’re lucky enough to come across a building or base that you haven’t seen before – i.e. one that may not be a total copy-and-paste job – the items in it are remarkably samey. You’ll soon be able to identify which items are valuable and which to leave behind… because there really aren’t that many different ones.
A helmet, a couple of lootable items, and a few items that can’t be picked up.
Looting a base can be a frustrating experience at points. Some items that look like they should be collectable aren’t, they’re just part of the scenery and can’t be picked up or interacted with in any way. And the items that can be collected soon feel repetitive. Sure, these items are, to some extent, a means to an end. You’re looting the base or scavenging in order to sell the items for credits to spend on things like ship upgrades or building a base.
But it begins to harm the sense of immersion to constantly be picking up the same handful of items over and over again at different places across the galaxy.
Combat:
Firing a laser rifle.
Combat in Starfield is solid. First-person combat with both guns and melee weapons is probably on par with similar titles in the action-RPG space like Cyberpunk 2077 – though with admittedly fewer options and less variety. But for Bethesda, this is a massive improvement! We’re not reaching the levels of a dedicated FPS like Doom Eternal, and enemies can feel a bit over-armoured and bullet-spongey. But considering how mediocre gunplay was in Fallout 76 (or Bethesda’s other Fallout games when you take VATS out of the equation) I must say I’m impressed.
I had some genuinely fun and tense moments fighting pirates and spacers, and gunplay felt fast-paced and exciting. Different weapon types behave differently and can apply different effects to a target, and there are some “rare” or “legendary” weapons that I’ve come across that have additional bonuses. I think crafting and modifying weapons is also an option here. The only drawback, at least in the first few hours of the game, is that there isn’t all that much variety. I might’ve come across a dozen different guns in total – but when you break that down into lasers, rifles, pistols, and shotguns… well, that’s literally three of each. I hope there’s more that I haven’t discovered yet.
Battling a spacer.
Space combat is likewise fun, though perhaps I’d call it the lesser of Starfield’s two ways to fight. Where gunplay on the ground felt a bit more strategic, with a need to take cover, aim, and generally plan how to win a fight, space battles seem to mostly consist of mashing the buttons over and over again. There is targetted aiming, which is how you can try to disable an enemy ship for boarding, but this is inexplicably locked behind a skill point and can’t be accessed right off the bat.
That being said, I’ve had some exciting space combat encounters in my time with Starfield so far. On one occasion I was overwhelmed by a force of spacers and had to grav-jump to safety, and waiting for my grav-drive to power up with my shields down and enemy ships raining a hail of missiles down on me was a genuinely tense and thrilling moment.
Polish and Bugs:
An enemy clipping (and firing their weapon) through a locked door.
Before the game was released, there was a particularly audacious claim by Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, that Starfield would have “the fewest bugs of any Bethesda game ever shipped,” and I said at the time that he would absolutely be held to account for that! I haven’t encountered any game-breaking bugs, unfinishable missions, or hard crashes while playing Starfield, and unlike many PC games over the last couple of years, the game seems to run well out of the gate. The frame-rate feels decent, there hasn’t been any stuttering, screen-tearing, or frame-drops, and overall the performance feels solid.
I have noticed that my GPU – an Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti – seems to run hotter than usual and with its fans spinning faster than usual while playing Starfield, but I wouldn’t call that a cause for concern at this stage – and it’s something that could be patched or perhaps modded somewhere down the line to improve things.
Pretty sure you’re supposed to sit on a chair…
However, some bugs have slipped through the cracks, despite Starfield’s long and exhaustive QA process. And many of these bugs feel like your typical Bethesda/Creation Engine fare: characters clipping through walls or doors, being able to shoot through doors, levitating, or making random movements. At one point a character I was in conversation with was facing the wrong way. Characters and items will occasionally “slide” as if on a polished or icy surface.
None of the bugs I encountered stopped me from completing a quest – though a handful of times an item or piece of loot would float away, leaving me unable to retrieve it. The bugs feel akin to those found in other Bethesda titles at launch, which some people claim to find endearing. I don’t – and given the promises attached to Starfield on the bug front, it’s disappointing to have seen so many bugs and glitches within just a few hours of playtime.
Conclusion:
Starfield has landed…
Starfield isn’t as much fun as I’d hoped it would be. It’s a game that brings together systems and mechanics that have been done before – and done better – in other titles, some of which are several years old. What it does offer is all of those things in one package, in the framework of a Bethesda RPG. If Bethesda and Xbox had done a better job of setting expectations, and had been more willing to say “no” and shut down wild speculation when it started to get out of hand, perhaps some of that disappointment could have been avoided.
That being said, Starfield isn’t a bad game by any means. I fully intend to spend more time with it, and it’s not inconceivable that my opinion will shift if the story picks up and I begin to find more items to loot and things to do. I just don’t feel especially engaged with Starfield right now, and the story hasn’t grabbed me in the way I’d have hoped. If it had, perhaps things like limited landing zones or spaceflight consisting more of fast travel menus than anything else wouldn’t feel like such a let-down.
Notes and drawings aboard a custom spaceship.
If there’s one takeaway I have from Starfield it’s this: the Creation Engine has got to go. It’s clearly no longer up to scratch, and practically every element of Starfield that I’ve singled out for criticism today is being held back by outdated software. Let Starfield be the final game to use this piece of kit, and when Bethesda shifts its focus to The Elder Scrolls VI, let’s hope that they finally retire this engine in favour of creating or licensing something more modern, and something that can really stand up to the rigours of modern game development.
Look at what other games in the RPG and action/adventure spaces are doing, and in so many ways, Starfield is being let down by its reliance on the Creation Engine. From character creation and procedural generation to graphics and bugs, the Creation Engine is showing its age and its flaws – and it’s got to go. Obviously Starfield has been made and released now, and we’ll have to deal with it as it is. But in future, Bethesda would be well-served by ending its reliance on this outdated technology.
You cannot go that way.
But that’s really a question for another time! Starfield is good but not great, a game with ambitious scope that brings together a lot of different gameplay ideas – but doesn’t always make them work as well as they do elsewhere. Want more exciting space combat? Pick up Star Wars Squadrons or Elite Dangerous. Want a better, more in-depth RPG? Try Baldur’s Gate 3. Outpost building in a sci-fi setting? Something like Frostpunk or Subnautica might be up your alley. Looking for a first-person adventure? Cyberpunk 2077 or even The Outer Worlds are no less enjoyable.
This is both Starfield’s selling-point and its biggest flaw: it brings together so many different concepts that it can’t possibly deliver a suitably in-depth experience with any of them. The role-playing side of the game is let down by incredibly basic quest design that’s akin to making a few clicks on a menu. Spaceflight is let down by… not actually being able to fly anywhere in space. Shipbuilding is let down by a lack of customisation options. Exploration is let down by incredibly repetitive environments and loot as well as the feeling that you’re never the first person to go somewhere. And so on. If you find something you like in Starfield, chances are it won’t last all that long before you see how shallow it is, and how little longevity or replayability it has to offer.
Touching down on the surface of a planet.
I will give Starfield credit, at least in its launch version at time of writing, for not being excessively-monetised. I feel that the “premium edition” was over-sold, and that paying £35 for five days of early access was poor, but within the game itself there aren’t any microtransactions, lootboxes, premium currencies, paid mods, or any of the other AAA trappings that too many titles include these days. Maybe that’s a low bar, but it’s one Starfield happily clears. I sincerely hope that such nonsense won’t be added later on.
Starfield is a game I’d recommend, at least to some folks. If you have Game Pass it’s a no-brainer – you might as well give it a shot to see how you get on with it. And if you’ve played and enjoyed any Bethesda game in the past, chances are you’ll find something to like in Starfield, too, as the game feels very similar; the DNA of titles like Morrowind is clearly noticeable. I don’t think the “premium edition” is worth £100, though!
On the surface of a planet, ready for exploration.
Bethesda certainly over-promised with Starfield, and lessons need to be learned on the marketing side of things to ensure the company does a better job at reining in out-of-control hype. But part of the problem lies with me – I internalised too much of the hype and excitement, and feel let down because Starfield is “just” another Bethesda open-world role-playing adventure and not the once-in-a-lifetime genre-buster that I’d hoped for. Part of that is on me, and while I have some critical thoughts about Starfield and the way it implements some of its systems and mechanics, at its core I think it’s still a decent game.
I will continue playing in the days and weeks ahead – though perhaps not every day nor with unshakable enthusiasm! If I find that I have more to say after beating the main quest or unlocking more of the game, I’ll be sure to write up my thoughts and impressions later in the year. For now, I hope this has been informative if you’re considering picking up Starfield for yourself, or at least an interesting perspective to consider. For the record, I don’t hate Starfield. I just feel a bit let down that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Starfield is out now for PC and Xbox Series S & X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Minor spoilers may be present for Starfield.
Today we’re continuing our look ahead to Starfield! Bethesda’s upcoming open-galaxy sci-fi role-playing game is my most-anticipated game right now… but that doesn’t mean I don’t have questions and concerns. We’ve taken a look at several already, but today I want to zero in on one very specific question that I have about Starfield: will the game truly be able to create the sense of scale that it’s clearly aiming for?
We can break down this question into a couple of big pieces. Firstly, we have the size of the game’s open galaxy – or rather, the amount of actual content relative to the size of the map. Will there be enough characters to interact with, enough settlements to visit, and enough of a world to get stuck into in a map that contains 1,000 explorable planets?
Is there a danger that Starfield might feel too… empty?
Secondly, we have the open nature of the game world itself. Although not strictly a true “open world” in the sense that Starfield’s “open galaxy” will be split up into star systems and planets, a hallmark of Bethesda titles going all the way back to the 1990s is that every square inch of the map is accessible and can be explored. In a game that takes place in a single province of a larger world, there’s still a sense of scale – that the world of Morrowind, Skyrim or Fallout exists beyond the confines of the game map. Starfield won’t have that – it can’t have it by design. That could be an issue, and it’s where my concern begins.
Take, for example, a game like Mass Effect 2 or Jedi: Fallen Order. Or in the open-world sphere, take a game like Red Dead Redemption II or The Witcher 3. All of these games manage to convey a sense of scale – of deep, persistent worlds that continue to exist beyond the confines of their playable maps, populated by, in some cases, literally trillions of individual people. One of the reasons that these games feel so much fun to play, and their stories so engaging, is precisely because as players, we know we’re only scratching the surface.
The story of Red Dead Redemption II feels like it takes place in one small corner of a vast world.
Even older Bethesda games managed to nail this feeling. Playing Morrowind, we knew that there was a whole continent beyond the confines of Vvardenfell, and in Fallout 4 it was clear that the Commonwealth was only one small patch of a much larger wasteland. These areas still felt lived-in, but part of the reason for that is because we knew that there were people and settlements beyond our reach, making the game world feel real.
By design, Starfield can’t have that. Opening up the entirety of the Settled Systems to players, including the capital cities of both major colonial factions, means that the idea of an expansive, populated world beyond the borders of the game’s map can’t exist. And that absolutely could be okay, but if Starfield’s open galaxy has a population comparable to that of a small town… I fear that an important part of the immersion will be lost before the game can even get going.
New Atlantis – the capital city of the United Colonies.
Every game has a limited number of non-player characters – it’s unavoidable. Even massive online games or expansive open-world titles have, at the very most, a few hundred or perhaps a thousand NPCs to engage with. But in most cases – and especially in games that succeed at creating that sense of expansiveness and immersion – there’s always the sensation that, despite the limited number of people available in the game, there are untold numbers of others just beyond the invisible wall dividing the game’s map from the rest of its world.
In Mass Effect 3, for example, it’s possible to walk across parts of the Citadel and really feel the scale of the massive space station. Sure, there are only a few dozen people to engage with, some of whom only have a single line of dialogue, but a combination of the game’s lore, art design, sound effects, narrative, and more all come together to make you feel that there’s so much more just out of sight.
The Silversun Strip on the Citadel in Mass Effect 3.
For me, the experience of playing a game that takes place in a small part of a much larger world is something I hadn’t really considered before Starfield. It was only when I began to truly consider the implications of an open-galaxy map with 1,000 planets to explore that I really zeroed in on one of the absolutely essential ways that so many games create that sense of immersion and scale.
And it’s not something exclusive to gaming by any means. Watch an episode or two of Star Trek, and you’ll soon get the sense that there’s far, far more going on in the galaxy beyond the adventures of a few officers aboard a single starship! Star Wars, too, has a densely-populated galaxy filled with alien races, criminal gangs, and so much more. As I’ve argued more than once, it seems positively criminal that Disney and Lucasfilm have insisted on revisiting the same handful of characters time and again when the setting is so vast and potentially interesting!
Cal Kestis in Jedi: Survivor.
As Starfield opens up its entire map to players, will there be enough content – and especially enough content relative to the size of the map – to really nail that sense of scale? If we can interact with everyone in the entirety of the Settled Systems… how long will it take before we realise that there isn’t anything more to this world? Enough to sustain a playthrough of the game, I hope… but is that enough?
Bethesda has recorded more dialogue for Starfield than it did for Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined. There could easily be well over 2,000 NPCs in the game, some of whom will have in-depth conversations with the player character. On the one hand, that’s a lot of chatter! But on the other, in a fully open map that supposedly depicts humanity’s expansion to colonies beyond the stars… 2,000 people seems like a minuscule number. It’s barely the population of a small town. When you add into the mix that these characters are going to be spread across four major settlements, space stations, spaceships, and perhaps small settlements and other locations too… I’m just worried that the sense of scale that a game like Starfield relies on will be lost.
Akila City in the Freestar Collective.
Despite its difficult launch and gameplay issues, Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that manages to really succeed at conveying a sense of scale. From almost the first moment, players are aware that they’re only one person in a vast world; a dense cityscape populated by thousands of people. Although it isn’t possible to travel far beyond the confines of the city, there’s still that sense that the world beyond Night City is vast – and that within the city itself, there are people going about their lives blissfully unaware of the protagonist’s story.
Sometimes, being “the chosen one” can also get in the way of this sense of scale. If the fate of the entire galaxy hinges on the player character and the actions they take, it’s much harder in a role-playing game to see oneself as just one character among many in a vast world. Bethesda does love its “chosen one” archetypes, though, so I wouldn’t be shocked to see it appear in Starfield in some form. If so, I hope it’s handled carefully – and perhaps buried deeply in the main quest, so players who don’t want to go down that road will have the opportunity to avoid it altogether!
Making the player character “the chosen one” (as in games like Morrowind) could add to the sense of Starfield being small in scale.
What makes a fictional world feel lived-in and real? I would argue very strongly that one very important factor is the notion that there’s more to that world than I as a player (or a reader, viewer, etc.) can see. No matter how large Starfield may be, no matter how expansive its map is, no matter how much of it I could take in in a single playthrough, and no matter whether the game has 2,000 or 10,000 NPCs to interact with, there’s a very real danger that it will feel limited, and dare I say even small. The idea that the story we’re taking part in is only one small part of the world of Starfield won’t exist, it can’t exist by design. The notion that there’s more, that Starfield is bigger than the available map and characters, cannot exist.
I hope that there will be so much to get stuck into that that sense won’t be overwhelming, and that Bethesda’s world-building will be better than ever to such an extent that I don’t notice. But part of the appeal of a game like Starfield is that I as a player am going to be whisked away to another world, a world in which I can get lost in the role-playing experience. Part of that, though I could never put it into words nor even really conceptualise it before thinking about Starfield, is because the worlds I’ve sought out feel bigger than the stories told in them. I’m not sure how Starfield can recreate that feeling based on what we know of the game – and there’s a genuine danger, I fear, that trying to pretend half the known galaxy is populated by a few thousand people is going to feel catastrophically unbalanced.
We’re pondering a big question about Starfield…
I said a couple of weeks ago that, if the “United Colonies” turns out to be a mere two cities, and if the Freestar Collective is likewise a “collective” consisting of just a couple of settlements, something will feel amiss. And this is what I meant by that. The concept of an expansive world that exists beyond the confines of a single story or the playable area of a game’s map is something that, based on everything we know at this stage, Bethesda has deliberately chosen not to create. It almost feels like we’re heading into uncharted territory – the game will be large, sure, but can it possibly be large enough to overcome that deficit? Will the number of settlements, the number of characters, the number of factions, and the overall amount of content relative to the size of the game world feel so unbalanced and out of whack that it will detract from the experience? If so… will those things prove fatal to the Starfield experience?
Thus far, my biggest concerns about Starfield have been on the practical side. Will the game be released in a polished state? Will it be overburdened with microtransactions? Will Xbox and Bethesda consider a last-second delay if further bug fixes and tweaks are needed? But this question of scale… it’s probably my single biggest gameplay concern right now. And this isn’t just a fear of a repeat of Fallout 76′s “big empty world,” a game map that had no NPCs to interact with and precious little to do. It’s deeper than that – it cuts to the very sense of immersion and believability that should be present in Starfield’s galaxy.
The crew of the Frontier.
Games like Red Dead Redemption II, Cyberpunk 2077, or the Mass Effect trilogy succeed, in part, because they get me to believe that a bigger world exists beyond the confines of the game map. And in a more general sense, whether we’re talking about novels, films, television shows, or video games, getting an audience not only to believe that a world exists but to care about it and feel a sense of investment in it is a key part of the pathway to suspension of disbelief and to enjoyment. Starfield may well succeed at creating an interesting, engaging world that I care about and want to see more of – but if that world feels like it’s limited to only the characters and locales present in the game, part of the immersion could be lost.
Conversely, this is set to be the biggest world that Bethesda has ever created, populated by more NPCs than in any single-player game that the studio has ever built. So perhaps the idea here is that players will be so overwhelmed with content – be that quests, factions, points of interest, or characters to chat with – that the game world will feel full to the point of being overstuffed. That could go some way to negating the fact that, well, we’ll be able to explore the entirety of the settled systems, visit every colony, land on every settled planet, and meet every single human who exists at that moment in Starfield’s future.
I really hope it won’t be an issue. I hope I’ll look back on this article in a month’s time and think how silly it was to be worried! But as the buildup to Starfield’s launch continues, it’s definitely something that’s weighing on my mind.
Starfield will be released on the 6th of September 2023 for PC and Xbox Series S/X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Minor spoilers may be present for Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield.
I’ll get into this in more detail in my review of Baldur’s Gate 3 – which is currently a work in progress – but I came to Larian’s Dungeons and Dragons CRPG with basically no expectations at all. The game wasn’t one that had been on my radar, I don’t know the first thing about Dungeons and Dragons, and the primary reason I picked it up is because it happened to be well-timed, releasing just as the hype train for Starfield has been building. I was looking for a new game to play, and Baldur’s Gate 3 reared its head, backed up by plenty of positive reviews. It felt like the right game at the right time – but little more than a way to kill some time while waiting for the real prize: Starfield.
Suffice to say, I undervalued Baldur’s Gate 3 in a pretty big way! The game is fantastic, as you’ve no doubt heard from other reviewers, and although I can’t call it “perfect,” it’s certainly the best game I’ve played in 2023 so far. It will absolutely rival Starfield for the coveted “Trekking with Dennis Award” come December, and if Starfield should falter… well, maybe it’ll even pip it to the post and scoop the prize. I wouldn’t have expected that even just a couple of weeks ago.
A promo screenshot of Baldur’s Gate 3.
There are two things that Baldur’s Gate 3 has done well that Bethesda needs to consider when it comes to Starfield. The first is microtransactions. There aren’t any in Baldur’s Gate 3, and that’s in spite of comparable titles like Diablo IV positively drowning in them. As I’ve noted more than once, we haven’t yet had confirmation from Bethesda that Starfield will be free from microtransactions, season passes, lootboxes, premium currencies, and other shit-smeared trappings of the modern video games industry.
Secondly, while I have encountered a few glitches and bugs in my thirty-plus hours with Baldur’s Gate 3, the game is complete and pretty polished. The main quest is complete, side missions and character quests are all unique and interesting, and the state of the game overall is pretty darn good. The main mechanics and systems it employs, from magic and spellcasting to combat and exploration, all work well, and there are plenty of choices that genuinely have an impact on the game world.
A relatively minor visual bug that I encountered in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Bethesda has acquired a reputation over the years, and it’s well-deserved. Major Bethesda releases, from Oblivion to Fallout 76, have all arrived with bugs and glitches to varying degrees. Bethesda’s publishing arm is also responsible for the likes of Redfall, a title ridiculed for its broken state earlier this year. While Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t entirely bug-free, it’s on a completely different scale from any of Bethesda’s launches.
The microtransaction issue is already one that I’ve been sceptical about when it comes to Starfield. Well before the game has even launched, Bethesda has already been touting the first piece of story DLC, an expensive £25 add-on. Expansion packs are no bad thing, don’t get me wrong, but it’s disappointing to see Bethesda leaning into add-ons and DLC so early in Starfield’s life. In contrast, Baldur’s Gate 3 may not have any DLC at all, with Larian potentially moving on to their next project instead, regarding the game and its story as complete.
Diablo IV has an awful and aggressive in-game monetisation scheme. Let’s hope Starfield follows the Baldur’s Gate 3 model…
The games are very different from one another. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a CRPG – a throwback, in many ways, to a style of game that has fallen out of fashion over the past twenty years or so. It employs turn-based combat, a third-person or isometric camera, and a game world broken up into several large regions (or levels) to accompany its three-act narrative.
Starfield, in contrast, is very much an action-RPG or even an RPG/shooter, with real-time combat inspired by the likes of id Software’s recent Doom and Doom Eternal titles. Although a third-person view is available, Bethesda has stated that the game is intended to primarily be played from a first-person perspective, and the game’s “open galaxy” map, while broken up into star systems and planets, isn’t split into sections or levels in the way that the map is in Baldur’s Gate 3. Starfield is also a sci-fi title to Baldur’s Gate 3′s fantasy setting.
Starfield will be a different kind of game – but with comparable features.
But there are plenty of similarities, too. Both games are role-playing experiences, both have skills to unlock, character progression, and both aim to tell expansive single-player stories complete with engaging characters, main and secondary quests to follow, and more. Though the comparison is not a direct one between two games with identical styles… it’s close enough that many Baldur’s Gate 3 players may be intending to play Starfield. In fact, Larian Studios deliberately moved up the release date of Baldur’s Gate 3 by more than a month to avoid a clash with Starfield.
So when I say that Baldur’s Gate 3 has set a high bar, I mean it. Coming just a few weeks apart, comparisons between the two games will be inevitable – and if Starfield should suffer a bumpy launch for any reason, those comparisons may not be favourable. Baldur’s Gate 3 will also be launching on PlayStation 5 the same week as Starfield arrives on PC and Xbox, so there’ll be a flood of new players joining the party. PlayStation fans may feel less bad at missing out on Starfield if Baldur’s Gate 3 is being heralded as the “better” title.
Baldur’s Gate 3 promo screenshot featuring a dragonborn warrior.
But we mustn’t get too far ahead of ourselves! It’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that players can enjoy one or both games on their own merit, without needing to “pick a side” or say which one is somehow “objectively better.” I want Starfield to be a fun experience – at least as much fun as Baldur’s Gate 3 has been for me over the past couple of weeks. But I recognise that, with the games releasing so close to one another, my impressions of Starfield – particularly insofar as how complete and polished it feels – will be coloured by my experience of Baldur’s Gate 3.
So… here’s the difficult part. In 2022, I praised Xbox and Bethesda for delaying Starfield. If the game needed more attention, more work, and more time to squash bugs and polish the experience, then a delay was unquestionably the right call. With a scant two weeks to go before Starfield’s pre-order exclusive early release, and with reviewers and publications eagerly awaiting their review copies… well, this is basically the last possible opportunity to delay the game. If Starfield should release with a level of bugs and glitches comparable in any way to the likes of Redfall or Fallout 76, not only will we lament this missed opportunity, but we’ll have those comparisons with Baldur’s Gate 3 to chew on.
Starfield was originally targeting a November 2022 release.
Whether you’ve played and enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3 or not, and regardless of whether it’s “your thing” or not, it’s undeniable that the game has raised the stakes for Starfield, and has set a high bar indeed for other single-player role-playing games to strive for. I hope Starfield can hit it. Heck, I hope Starfield smashes through it and sets a new, even higher bar! It’s rare to get a title as fun and as consumer-friendly as Baldur’s Gate 3, so to get two in a row would be beyond fantastic. You know what they say: you wait ages for something and then two come along at once!
Where I see the biggest potential comparison is with one of my biggest concerns about Starfield: monetisation. We’re so close to Starfield’s launch, and yet Bethesda and Xbox have still failed to clarify what kind of monetisation we can expect to see in the game. Unless the answer is “none at all,” as Larian repeatedly assured players in the run-up to the launch of Baldur’s Gate 3, that will already be a disappointment. Should that monetisation extend beyond large-scale expansion packs to include things like premium currencies or lootboxes… that could spell disaster.
Bethesda and Xbox have yet to comment on microtransactions in Starfield.
What Larian has done with Baldur’s Gate 3 is something that other AAA studios should strive for. Of course it’s true that not every game can be as expansive and feature-rich as Baldur’s Gate 3… but every game should be able to take inspiration from it in different areas. Single-player games shouldn’t need in-game monetisation to turn a profit. AAA studios should be launching complete games, not broken, “release now, fix later” messes, nor games with incomplete stories and promises of “roadmaps” to more content. Larian has also shown a willingness to listen to feedback from players through an extensive early access period, and while I’m generally sceptical about big studios using early access, and of long early access periods in general, in this case it seems to have worked as intended for once.
The fact is that Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t anything new, nor even particularly innovative. In many ways it’s actually a throwback to an older style of game that was prominent in the 1990s and early 2000s. As that kind of gameplay has fallen by the wayside in the push to open worlds, always-online experiences, and microtransactions… it feels different in 2023.
But that’s just a really sad commentary on the sorry state of the video games industry. A consumer-friendly game, one that doesn’t chase every trend going nor try to extort its players for extra cash, finds itself becoming headline news.
The titular city of Baldur’s Gate.
When I looked ahead to the games I was most interested to play in 2023, titles like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Redfall, Forspoken, and of course Starfield were all contenders. After several of those proved to be disappointing or underwhelming, it’s been a genuinely cathartic experience to pick up a new game and just… really enjoy playing it. That Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t on my radar and was thus an unexpected surprise just adds to that.
There has been chatter online and on social media about Baldur’s Gate 3 being a unique project that shouldn’t become the “industry standard” that players expect to see going forward. And there’s an element of truth to that: most games won’t be old-school CRPGs with hundreds of hours of content. But in terms of adopting consumer-friendly practices, abandoning trends when they don’t fit with the story a game is telling, and focusing on delivering a quality product… those are things that players can and should expect. Some of us never stopped asking the video games industry and its biggest corporations to deliver those things. Maybe the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 – coupled with some spectacular failures over the past few years – will finally be the catalyst that makes these corporations sit up and listen.
And as for Starfield… the bar has been well and truly raised. I can only hope that Xbox and Bethesda have done enough to reach it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is out now for PC, will be released on PlayStation 5 on the 6th of September, and will be released on Xbox Series consoles in 2024. Starfield will be released on PC and Xbox Series consoles on the 6th of September. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the copyright of Larian Studios, and is based on Dungeons and Dragons which is owned by Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are no major story spoilers for Starfield, but there may be spoilers for the game and its features and systems. This article also uses screenshots and promotional images.
Well it turns out that my last post about Starfield wasn’t enough, and that there are still more questions about the game! Starfield is my most-anticipated game right now, and along with my excitement for Bethesda’s upcoming open-galaxy sci-fi role-playing shooter, I have some concerns and some general questions about the game and how it will work. A few days ago I posed ten questions about Starfield – so click or tap here to check out those questions if you haven’t already – but I’ve already come up with ten more!
What I’m trying to do with these questions is not say “here’s a feature that I think must be part of the game,” because I don’t want to make the mistake of getting over-hyped nor building up an inaccurate picture of Starfield. Instead, what I want to do is fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of the game, because there are things that Bethesda hasn’t clarified. There are features that seemed to be hinted at by the Starfield showcase that haven’t been confirmed, there are questions raised by statements Bethesda and Xbox made, and then there are systems and mechanics that have been included in past Bethesda or Xbox titles that may make their way to Starfield – we just don’t know yet! That’s my mindset when I pose these questions, anyway. As I said when I wrote up my Starfield “wishlist,” I have high hopes that the game will be fun regardless of whether or not it does everything that I think I want from it at this early stage!
A handgun.
I have a couple of caveats that I always give when I put together a list like this one. The first is that I have no “insider information,” nor any connection with Bethesda, Xbox, or Microsoft. I’m not claiming that anything we’re going to talk about will, won’t, or must be part of Starfield – this is a list put together by someone who’s interested in the game, based on the showcase, interviews, and other marketing material. Secondly, all of this is the subjective opinion of one person – so if you hate all of my questions and ideas, that’s totally okay!
Finally, as I said last time, I haven’t seen every single interview that Starfield’s developers and producers have given. Nor have I read every single press release, comment, or social media post – so it’s possible that I’ve missed something, or that one of the questions on this list will have already been answered. My ageing brain may not have retained everything, too!
With all of that out of the way, then, let’s jump into my list of questions!
Question #1: Is the main quest fully complete? Or: will DLC be required to complete the main story?
Starfield’s premium edition includes access to the first piece of planned DLC.
As you can see from the image above, pre-ordering the “premium edition” of Starfield grants players access to the first piece of planned DLC. I’ve already expressed my scepticism about this; it seems far too early to be considering DLC when the game isn’t even out. But the subtitle of this piece of DLC is what I’m curious about today, because Shattered Space is described as the “first story expansion” for Starfield.
This raises the unpleasant spectre of an incomplete game; a “release now, fix later” title with promises of a “roadmap” to more content. This is the model often adopted by “live service” games, and it seldom works as intended. I’m all for an expansion pack, don’t get me wrong, but the way this one has been advertised has me at least a little worried.
How’s that roadmap working out for you, Anthem?
Bethesda has two points in its favour here, as I see it. The first is that, despite a very poor launch, the company has continued to support Fallout 76 with updates and expansions. Even if Starfield is released to poor critical reception, that gives me hope that support for the game will continue, and that at the very least that first planned expansion will still arrive. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Bethesda’s single-player titles have been well-supported by expansion packs. Morrowind got massive expansions in Tribunal and Bloodmoon, and as much as we like to mock Oblivion’s horse armour DLC, that game also received the major Shivering Isles expansion pack. So the company has a solid track record here.
That being said, I’m still a little concerned about Starfield’s story potentially not being complete at launch. Given that the base game is already priced at £60 or $70, it would be nigh-on exploitative to force players to pay an additional fee of at least £25 or $30 to buy the next chapter of the story. Even more so considering that Shattered Space has been in development alongside the base game.
Question #2: Is Starfield capped at 30fps on PC? Or: is it possible to push Starfield to 60fps and beyond on higher-end PCs?
A fancy-pants gaming PC. (No, it’s not mine!)
Although it wasn’t discussed at the showcase, Starfield’s director Todd Howard subsequently confirmed in an interview that the game will be capped at 30 frames-per-second on Xbox Series S and X consoles, with the less-powerful machine also running the game at 1440p resolution. In the same interview, Howard seemed to indicate that the game can run at 60fps on PC, at least in Bethesda’s internal tests.
But what hasn’t been made clear is whether that will be an option for players on PC. Many modern PC games have frame-rate options as standard, and offer features like Vsync, where the game will match a monitor’s refresh rate. I recently upgraded to an RTX 3070 Ti – a fairly powerful GPU. I’d expect to hit at least 60fps in most titles – or at least in games that are well-optimised and have proper PC ports!
Todd Howard, Starfield’s director.
Thats being said, I’m not a stickler for frame-rate in the way some folks are. I’m not even sure I could tell much of a difference between frame-rates in a lot of cases. But 60fps isn’t even the gold standard, it’s a fairly low bar that most PC games in 2023 should be able to clear. If Starfield is so massive and so detailed that its console version needs to be frame-capped, then I guess that makes sense. But many folks have PCs with specs that far exceed the Xbox Series X.
If this isn’t an official feature, don’t despair. I wouldn’t be shocked at all to see a mod pop up in the days after Starfield’s launch that uncaps the game’s frame rate!
Question #3: What impact (if any) do different levels of gravity have on exploration and combat?
Firing a weapon in zero-G.
At the showcase we saw a zero-G section of gameplay featured prominently. Whether this is a recurring feature, or whether zero-G sections are part of scripted missions only wasn’t clear – but it was still something cool to see. We also saw that planets could have different levels of gravity, which makes sense!
But what wasn’t entirely clear from the gameplay that was shown off is what impact – if any – this will have. If I land on a high-gravity planet, for instance, does that mean I move slower, or can carry fewer items? On a low-gravity world can I jump tens of metres into the air without a jetpack? And what about firing a weapon – do projectiles have less range in high gravity than in low?
Will exploring in low gravity differ from exploring in high gravity?
I’m not banking on any of those things being true, because it seems like it would be complicated and time-consuming to create features like that. But at the same time, it would be neat if gravity was a consideration. There are so many different ways in which this could manifest, potentially impacting everything from combat to resource-gathering.
Although I’m not necessarily expecting a massive and deep gravity levels system, what I will say is this: if a planet designated as a high-gravity world and a planet designated as a low-gravity world are functionally the same, with gravity not seeming to have much of an impact on exploration or gameplay, it will raise the question of why it was even mentioned or included!
Question #4: Will DLC eventually come to Game Pass?
Game Pass is building up quite the library of titles!
As noted above, there’s already DLC planned for Starfield. But it doesn’t seem like that DLC will come to Game Pass – at least, not at first. The base game is available on Game Pass, but it’s also possible to pre-order the premium edition of Starfield, complete with the DLC. This kind of feels like a rough deal for Game Pass players – especially if the first piece of DLC won’t be ready for months or even years.
To be fair to Starfield, other games work a similar way. DLC for the likes of Age of Empires II is also something that has to be bought separately – but that doesn’t really excuse it. This is something Microsoft will have to figure out as Game Pass continues to grow, and while some optional content and DLC might still be okay to sell separately, things like Shattered Space might not be – especially if it’s vital to complete the main quest.
Game Pass players get access to one of the pre-order bonuses.
With Skyrim, the current Game Pass version includes the game’s major expansion packs. So I wonder if, at some point in the future, Starfield will be updated in a similar way. Microsoft is raking in the money from Game Pass every single month, and I’m sure that Starfield’s launch will bring an influx of new subscribers to the platform. But when Shattered Space is ready, some of those folks will be disappointed to learn that they have to pay an additional charge on top of their Game Pass subscription.
The subscription model is still new in the gaming realm, and there are questions like this that need to be sorted out! But if Game Pass is to achieve Microsoft’s aim of being “the Netflix of video games,” then it can’t get away with continuing to charge for add-ons and expansion packs, surely. Netflix doesn’t do that; you don’t get access to the first season of The Witcher then have to pay an additional fee to watch Season 2. So I’d love to see Shattered Space and any further DLC expansion packs come to Game Pass on day one.
Question #5: How important is crafting? And: can weapons and items break?
A weapon in the inventory menu.
I’m biased here: I detest weapon and item durability in practically every game. Very few titles manage to get this feature right, and more often than not it just turns into a frustrating experience. Weapons breaking partway through combat and items needing to be replaced every ten minutes may seem “realistic” in some ways… but it’s not exactly fun.
There are better ways to deal with weapons and items, such as cosmetic wear and tear, upgrades, or simply offering an abundance of choice. Rather than forcing players to a workbench or crafting station to keep re-creating or repairing tools, it’s far better – in my opinion, of course – to figure out other ways to make gameplay interesting.
This may be an in-game crafting station.
This also speaks to a potentially much larger point: what kind of role will there be for crafting in Starfield? We know that there can be a crafting station aboard a player’s spaceship, but how often will we be required to use it? What kind of items will we need to craft or upgrade? And crucially: how necessary will crafting be?
Bethesda role-playing games have always offered customisation options, even for things like weapons. Swords could be enchanted in Morrowind, for instance, and guns could be upgraded in Fallout 4. The latter also introduced settlement building, with resources needing to be collected. I feel there’s scope for a detailed and in-depth crafting system in Starfield, but I also think it’s something that may be optional for players who want a more action-forward experience.
Question #6: Can we give names to outposts and planets?
“Jemison Outpost 1” doesn’t feel like the most inspired name…
I’m fairly sure that re-naming spaceships is possible in Starfield; it certainly seems that way based on footage from the showcase. And of course the player character’s name can be freely chosen. But what about outposts and planets? We saw at the showcase several locations that were simply called “civilian outpost” or “industrial outpost,” so I’m not sure whether or not this will be possible.
It would be nice to be able to give a name to an outpost, though! Instead of making my home at the rather clinical and official-sounding “mining outpost,” it would be neat if I could give it a more personal name that reflects my character, their style, or even simply geographic features present at the base.
The moon Tau Ceti VIII-b.
While I have some hope for outpost names being possible, I’m far less convinced that re-naming planets will be part of Starfield. But again, I’d quite like this to be included in the game. Obviously we won’t be re-naming Mars or Jemison, nor any of the other named worlds that already have settlements. But if I stumble upon an uninhabited rock called something like Kepler-295 B, and decide to build the first-ever human outpost on its surface, I’d like to be able to give that world a more personal name!
Maybe this seems like something minor, and it is in a way. But these kinds of personal touches can go a long way to making the role-playing experience feel immersive; coming home to Fort Dennis on the planet Dentopia would be a lot more fun than returning to Outpost #7 on Kepler-259 B.
Question #7: How do factions work? Or: does joining one faction permanently cut off another?
The Freestar Collective is one of the main factions in Starfield.
In past Bethesda games, choosing to associate with one faction over another could permanently cut off that second faction, making it impossible to complete every available quest in a single playthrough. The example that leaps to mind are Morrowind’s Great Houses: joining one would mean the other two would be permanently unavailable.
This adds a lot of replay value to a game, especially if those factions have well-developed characters and long, detailed questlines of their own. Indeed, one of the appeals of a Bethesda role-playing game is that some of these factions and their missions can be at least as in-depth as the main quest and just as worthwhile to play.
Joining one Great House in Morrowind would permanently close off the other two in that playthrough.
We’ve seen at least a hint at something similar in Starfield via the traits menu in the character creator. Choosing to have a United Colonies background means that players can’t also choose to have a Freestar Collective background, and there are three religious affiliations which are also mutually exclusive. Whether and to what extent those traits will impact gameplay is still not known, but it’s interesting, at any rate.
Starfield will contain joinable factions in addition to the Constellation organisation, and it seems logical to assume that being a member of the Freestar Rangers might permanently cut off membership in the United Colonies’ space force. That’s just one example. If these factions are as deep and well-developed as we’d hope they would be in a Bethesda game, this feature would add a ton of replayability to Starfield.
Question #8: Are there invisible walls? Or: are landing zones limited in size?
Will we see a message like this in Starfield?
This kind of ties into a point that I raised last time: how much of the surface of an individual planet can be explored? There was mention at the showcase and in subsequent interviews about selecting a “landing zone” on a planet’s surface – with players seemingly given a completely free choice of where to land. But do those zones have limits, or is it truly going to be possible to circumnavigate a planet on foot?
If there are limits to landing zones, I hope that invisible walls won’t be the way it’s handled. Something like that would absolutely break the immersion, even if landing zones are massive in size. A game that encourages exploration will surely push players to roam far away from their spaceships.
A spaceship on the surface of a planet.
I’m not really sure how Starfield should deal with this. The best-case scenario is that exploration is completely unlimited, and players who want to will be able to go on long-distance expeditions far away from where they landed. Look at games like Minecraft, for example, and how some players will go on huge treks across vast swathes of the procedurally-generated map.
That being said, there are ways in sci-fi to generate a technobabble explanation or reason for just about anything! If it were explained at an early stage that, for example, communicators had a limited range, then maybe that could be an excuse for why roaming too far beyond where a spaceship landed isn’t possible. I think running into a random invisible wall with no explanation won’t cut it, but some kind of “turn back” message, perhaps with multiple warnings preceding it, could work.
Question #9: Are gas giants among the promised 1,000 explorable planets? Or: what role will gas giants play in Starfield?
This appears to be a moon orbiting a gas giant.
Plenty of images and clips of Starfield prominently feature gas giants – massive planets like Saturn and Jupiter that are mostly comprised of hydrogen, helium, and other gaseous material. Because of the nature of gas giants, there isn’t a “surface” to speak of that can be visited; gas giants are comprised of various layers of gases and liquids, with the “boundaries” between different densities often being very gradual.
So it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be able to land on gas giants – but can we fly near them? Can we fly into their cloudy atmospheres at all? What about gathering resources? In real life, gas giants are known to harbour vast quantities of helium – and helium-3 is confirmed to be the material used for spaceship fuel in Starfield. So gas giants could conceivably have resources to collect… somehow.
Jupiter and its moon Io, as photographed by NASA’s Cassini probe.
But how would this work? You can’t build an outpost on a gas giant like you would on the surface of a planet, and unless spaceships can be outfitted with equipment to harvest resources – something we also haven’t seen – then I’m just not sure how we’d go about extracting anything from a gas giant in the game.
Finally, Starfield’s marketing has promised 1,000 planets to explore. In real life, the majority of planets that have been discovered so far are gas giants or ice giants; will that be true of the majority of Starfield’s 1,000 planets, too? If so, it could cut down the number of planets we can actually land on by a considerable margin.
Question #10: Are there procedurally-generated quests and missions?
Will some NPCs be randomly generated or dish out random quests?
We know that Starfield will use procedural generation for some of its planets and environments. There’s still a degree of confusion over how exactly this will function, but today I’m asking a different question! Are all of Starfield’s missions and quests hand-crafted? Or will there be procedurally-generated quests and missions?
Some games have random encounters and/or missions with set parameters but where the specific details are procedurally-generated. This could include, for example, a quest involving killing a monster – but where the quest-giver is a procedurally-generated NPC, the monster type is chosen at random, and so on.
Discovering a hand-crafted location in a random place!
Another example would be the patented “nemesis” system used in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel. Random NPCs in the enemy army would be promoted, depending on the actions of the player, and defeating these levelled-up enemies was an integral part of both titles. I’m not expecting anything like this in Starfield, it’s just an example of how this kind of randomness can work!
So will Starfield have anything comparable? Or have all of the game’s missions and quests been constructed by human developers from the ground up? The way Bethesda has talked about the game seems to suggest that at least some quests may take place in randomly-assigned locations.
So that’s it!
Is that a crashed spaceship?
I managed to find another ten questions that I’d love Bethesda and Xbox to answer before Starfield’s release.
As I’ve said before, the point here is not to pre-emptively criticise the game, nor to deliberately seek out things to pick on. Instead, I’m concerned that Bethesda and Microsoft ought to do more to rein in speculation when it gets out-of-hand. If a feature isn’t going to be included in the game, or won’t behave in the way players are expecting, it’s infinitely better to say so now, months before release. The alternative is that the hype train ends up going down the wrong track – before ultimately derailing when players finally get their hands on Starfield.
A good marketing team knows how to say “no” in a way that isn’t offputting, and how to redirect the conversation in a positive direction. If the interiors of spaceships can’t be customised, for example, then tell us and be up-front about that – but also shine a light on outpost building or the variety of costumes and cosmetic options elsewhere in the game. That’s just one example. But covering things up or saying “pass” when asked a basic question about an in-game system or feature that would in no way be a spoiler… well, it isn’t always a good look.
Dogfighting in space!
There are reasons why Starfield should sit in the “wait for the reviews” category. But at the same time, it’s absolutely my most-anticipated game and I can feel the hype train leaving the station. I really can’t wait to get my hands on Starfield, and even if the game doesn’t do absolutely everything that I think I want it to right now, I still think we’re in for a fun time.
There are quests in practically all of Bethesda’s older games that I still haven’t played – or even started! These games tend to be overstuffed with things to do, such that even years later I still haven’t seen or done it all. But I greatly enjoyed all of them in different ways, and the chance to take to the stars in a sci-fi role-playing game like this… it has the potential to be incredible. I haven’t felt this much excitement for a new game since Bethesda’s own Morrowind more than two decades ago!
Starfield will be released on the 6th of September 2023 for PC and Xbox Series S/X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Although there are no major story spoilers for Starfield, spoilers are still present for the game and some of its systems.
Yes, we’re talking Starfield again! Bethesda’s upcoming open-galaxy sci-fi role-playing game is absolutely my most-anticipated game right now, and there’s a lot to look forward to. There are also a few points of concern! I’ve covered both here on the website already, but today I thought it could be fun to put together a “wishlist.” We’re going to talk about some of my biggest concerns for Starfield as well as some possible inclusions that haven’t been announced. We’re also going to look at some of the game’s announced features and mechanics and consider how I’d like them to be used.
The major caveat I always give when putting together a wishlist is this: I have no “insider information.” I’m not trying to claim that anything listed below *is* going to be part of Starfield – no matter how much I might want it to be! I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that the game Bethesda has developed will be plenty of fun to play regardless of whether my “wishes” end up being granted!
A custom spaceship.
And as always, all of this is the wholly subjective opinion of one person. If I miss something that seems obvious to you, or if you disagree with all of my ideas, that’s totally okay! There’s enough room in the gaming community and the Starfield fandom for differences of opinion and respectful disagreement.
Now that that’s out of the way, there are a few points from the recent Starfield presentation that were left unclear, with features I’d like to see included in the game that weren’t announced or discussed in detail. There are also some concerns about the game – from its marketing and hype bubble to Bethesda’s reputation. Let’s jump into the list and look at each of my wishes in turn.
Wish #1: No microtransactions and especially no paid mods.
Starfield will launch with pre-order bonuses.
I was alarmed to see that the special edition of Starfield comes with a handful of character costumes that aren’t going to be part of the main game. Pre-order bonuses are nothing new, of course… but I fear that this is just the canary in the coal mine; a harbinger of some potentially aggressive in-game monetisation.
In a free-to-play game, I’m much more forgiving when it comes to microtransactions. They mustn’t be exploitative, of course, and prices still need to be measured and reasonable, but a game that doesn’t charge its players anything up-front has to make its money back somehow. Starfield will be a fully-priced game, retailing for £60 here in the UK or $70 in the United States, and that means microtransactions are absolutely unacceptable.
An in-game shop in Diablo IV.
I was astonished by the scale of Diablo IV’s in-game marketplace. That game has online features, but it can be a wholly single-player experience – and it’s charging players £20/$25 in some cases for character skins and other cosmetic items. To me, that’s so far beyond the pale that it almost feels laughable.
Bethesda is one of the pioneers of this kind of nonsense, too, with Oblivion’s notorious horse armour DLC in 2006 paving the way for this kind of in-game monetisation in single-player titles. Bethesda has also tried to monetise mods, with multiple attempts to get the “Creation Club” off the ground in both Skyrim and Fallout 4. Paid mods could (and should) be the subject of an entire article one day – but for now, suffice to say it’s something I want to be kept as far away from Starfield as possible.
Wish #2: Customisable spaceship interiors.
A bed – I hope there will be options to customise it!
Bethesda showed off spaceship customisation extensively at the showcase – and the feature looks amazing. But what wasn’t shown was to what extent the interior of spaceships can be modified and customised… or if that’s even going to be possible at all. Part of me thinks that, if it were possible to make any sort of modification to a vessel’s interior, Bethesda would have shown it off and talked about it. So I suspect this particular wish may not be granted.
We saw a Bethesda developer depositing a large number of sandwiches that she’d pilfered onto a table aboard her ship – so it’s obviously possible to place some in-game items aboard a spaceship and have them remain there. But whether that extends to things like furniture is unclear.
Customising a spaceship’s exterior has been shown off…
At the very least, I’d like to see basic options for things like colours being included. If I want a hot pink spaceship for my gay-as-hell pirate – and if you know me, you know that’s exactly what I want – then it would feel a bit disappointing if the inside of that ship was just a boring white or grey colour.
As far back as Morrowind it was fun to put items on shelves and tables, to decorate a home or cave and make it feel a bit more personalised. If Starfield only gives us pre-made pieces to snap together, with no possibility for further customisation, part of the role-playing experience will be lost. We know that the interior of outposts on planets can be customised – at least to an extent – so I hope spaceships can be too. If not, this should be a priority for the game’s first free update!
Wish #3: A polished, bug-free launch – or a delay if that won’t be possible.
A visual bug in Fallout 76.
In 2022, I praised the decision to delay Starfield. If the game wasn’t going to be ready for prime-time in November of last year, a delay was the only thing Microsoft and Bethesda could have done. But Starfield’s hype bubble has inflated massively since the showcase, and with a release date at the beginning of September seemingly set in stone, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to launch the game whether it’s ready or not.
This year alone we’ve seen far too many bug-riddled, broken, unfinished games pushed out too early by greedy publishers. Microsoft and Bethesda are not immune from this, either, with Redfall being an absolute abomination only a few weeks ago. Given the state of other Bethesda titles when they were released – Fallout 76 most notably – there are reasons to be concerned. Starfield is, for me, a game firmly in the “wait for the reviews” column.
A broken character model in Redfall.
Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty was recently quoted as saying that Starfield would have “the fewest bugs of any Bethesda game ever shipped” if it were released today… and that’s a bold claim that he will be held accountable for. It’s easy for any developer worth their salt to put together a “vertical slice” of gameplay that runs well and is polished, and even the worst and most incomplete, broken games can look decent in their own marketing material. All that we’ve seen of Starfield so far has been promotional bumf released by Bethesda, so until the game is actually in the hands of real players, we can’t be sure of its condition.
There is a lot riding on Starfield for Bethesda; the company is looking to recover its reputation after Fallout 76. But there’s a lot riding on the game’s success for Xbox and Microsoft, too. If Starfield goes the way of Anthem or even Cyberpunk 2077, the situation may not be salvageable… and that could lead to serious long-term problems for Bethesda and its parent company. If Starfield isn’t good enough by September, then for god’s sake delay it!
Wish #4: Small towns and settlements to visit beyond the main cities.
The city of New Atlantis.
At time of writing we know of four major settlements in Starfield: Akila City in the Freestar Collective, the pleasure city of Neon, New Atlantis in the United Colonies, and Cydonia on Mars. We also caught a glimpse of a space station that looked quite large, as well as a location called “Red Mile” that we don’t know much about yet. But that’s all.
In Skyrim there were nine cities, five smaller towns, and a number of settlements and farmsteads scattered across the map. Fallout 4 likewise had several larger and smaller towns, and even Morrowind had a number of smaller places to visit outside of the main settlements. I hope that some of Starfield’s planets will have colonies or small towns to encounter, especially if they aren’t tied to the main quest. I hope that both the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective will have other settlements outside of their capital cities. And I hope that these locations will be visually interesting and fun to visit!
The town of Pelagiad from Morrowind is an example of the kind of place I’m thinking of.
This really speaks to a bigger concern that I have about Starfield – namely that the game’s massive open-galaxy map could feel incredibly empty. Without these smaller settlements and the people that live there, Starfield risks feeling very under-populated. If the galaxy only contains four cities and a couple of thousand people… the population relative to the size of the map will be completely out-of-balance.
Bethesda has shown off a handful of locations, like an abandoned mine populated by hostile NPCs, but I’m looking for settlements akin to Morrowind’s Pelagiad or Fallout 3′s Grayditch – small towns with a few characters to encounter that go a long way to making their respective worlds feel lived-in and complete.
Wish #5: Heads-up display options.
The HUD during spaceflight.
One visual choice that I wasn’t wild about came during some of the first-person spaceflight sections shown off in the Starfield showcase. A well-designed cockpit could be seen, complete with buttons, screens, and readouts… but clumsily slapped on top of that was the game’s HUD in transparent boxes.
For me, this detracted from the way those spaceflight sections looked. I’d love to be able to move things like power management to those screens directly, and to see my character pushing buttons that correspond with the actions I’m taking. Failing that, I hope there’s at least an option to minimise or hide the HUD so it doesn’t get in the way.
Transferring energy between systems.
This is less of an issue on the ground, at least from what we saw at the showcase. And a good heads-up display is important; the HUD contains vital information like the amount of ammo you have left, the state of your health, a mini-map, and more. But during those spaceflight sections in particular, I felt that the HUD was clunky and got in the way.
The best-case scenario would be to move the HUD options directly to one or two of the screens in the cockpit. That would be fantastic to see! But at the very least if there could be options to hide this during first-person spaceflight, that would go a long way to helping with that sense of immersion that Starfield is going for.
Wish #6: Difficulty and accessibility options.
Difficulty options in Skyrim.
Say it with me, folks: difficulty options are an accessibility feature! Many modern games offer things like large text, colour-blindness settings, motion sickness settings, and more. One of the best games I’ve played in terms of the sheer number of accessibility features was Control, but other titles like Grounded have been pioneers, with options to dial back the fear factor in some of its bugs and arachnids.
Accessibility extends to difficulty, too, and while I certainly hope that Starfield will pose a challenge for folks who need or want that, I hope there will be options to dial back the difficulty to allow those of us who don’t want to die every six seconds to have an enjoyable time! There’s hope in that regard: Skyrim and Fallout 4 both had decent difficulty options. The addition of a “hard-core” mode with permadeath could be fun for some players, too… but it definitely won’t be something I choose to activate!
I hope I won’t be seeing this very often!
A role-playing game needs to be adaptable, allowing players with different ability levels to participate. Bethesda has usually made an effort, at least, to get this right – but modern games allow for many more options in that regard. It should be possible to dial down the difficulty of combat, for instance, while maintaining a higher difficulty level for something like lockpicking or puzzle-solving.
There’s been a trend in some modern games, pioneered by the likes of the Dark Souls series, toward a punishing level of difficulty. That’s fine for some players – but it would deny Starfield to millions more, myself included. There are games I’ve genuinely wanted to play that were denied to me because they were totally inaccessible – I hope Starfield won’t be among them.
Wish #7: Pets!
An alien life-form!
It’s already been confirmed that we won’t be able to “mount” any of the wild animals we encounter in Starfield. That’s fine by me, as mounts and vehicles weren’t things I was expecting. But it would be really sweet and cute if we could get pets for our spaceships and outposts!
These could either be purchasable from in-game vendors, perhaps with Earth animals like cats or dogs being available. Or, as an alternative, tamed alien animals that we encounter out in the game’s open world. We’ve already seen that players can choose an ability to pacify aggressive animals – it’s not much of a leap from that to having a tamed, domesticated pet!
Commander Shepard with their fish tank in Mass Effect 3.
If this isn’t something included in the base game, it’s absolutely something that Bethesda should consider for an update or even as a standalone piece of DLC. Other games have done this: from Commander Shepard’s hamster and fish tank in Mass Effect 2 through to horses in Red Dead Redemption II and the mini-games required to properly care for them. It’s possible to pet cats and dogs in games like Ghostwire Tokyo, and Bethesda’s own Fallout 4 gave players a pet dog to accompany them!
This is pure fantasy, of course, as it’s a feature that hasn’t been announced or even teased. But the ability to acquire a pet would add a lot to the pure role-playing immersion of a game like Starfield.
Wish #8: Make those traits and backgrounds matter.
The traits menu in the character creator.
The Starfield showcase highlighted both character backgrounds and optional traits – all of which seem like they have the potential to really shake up the way Starfield plays. Some traits add wholly new characters or change the way different factions will react to the player character, and that’s great… I just hope that it matters in a meaningful way.
In Cyberpunk 2077, the much-vaunted “life paths” that a player could choose ultimately had very little impact on gameplay. Outside of a short prologue, which was different for each, there was one solitary quest – and a short one at that – midway through the game, and a couple of places where different dialogue options could appear. That was it. There really wasn’t much to Cyberpunk’s life paths, certainly not enough to add much by way of replayability.
One of the available backgrounds.
Starfield needs to get this right. If I can choose to be a chef who frequently goes home to visit their parents, then playing the game with those options needs to feel substantially different from choosing to be a gangster with a bounty on their head. If these things will only have a superficial impact on gameplay, then they won’t really matter – and that will damage the sense of immersion and make starting a second save file feel less than worthwhile.
If these traits and backgrounds in their various combinations don’t matter as much as Bethesda’s marketing has suggested, then they may as well be scrapped and Starfield could have a Skyrim-style class system instead. It’s hard to see how all of the fifteen or more different backgrounds could each be given their own unique questlines and extensive dialogue options… but an effort has to be made!
Wish #9: A reason to explore – and to keep exploring.
A star system.
Recent interviews by Starfield’s director Todd Howard have confirmed that approximately 10% of the game’s 1,000 planets will have life on them. That leaves 900+ planets being lifeless, but with resources to collect and possibly a handful of ruins or abandoned outposts to discover.
Starfield needs to ensure that players have a reason to explore these worlds. Forced scarcity of resources won’t cut it – and could easily become frustrating. If the game’s Constellation organisation is focused on exploration, then there has to be a reason why they’re pushing the player to explore these planets. Seeking out ancient artefacts could be part of that – but again, there will be a lot of planets that don’t have any. What reason will players have to visit these worlds?
What reason do I have to visit these planets?
I think it’s possible that DLC will add new locations, crashed spaceships, ruined colonies, and much more to some of these empty planets… assuming that Bethesda will be in a position to continue to support Starfield post-release. That’s a longer-term solution, though, and doesn’t really get away from the immediate problem of what could be a map that’s simply too large for the amount of content that will be contained in it.
This is one of my biggest worries, to be honest. I have no doubt that Bethesda will have created some wonderful characters, some fun quests, and some engaging storylines… but will that content be too thinly spread? Or will most of it be concentrated in a handful of big cities and populated planets? Fallout 76 felt big and empty; an open-world with nothing to do and no reason to explore it beyond admiring the scenery. I hope that Starfield hasn’t fallen into the same trap.
Wish #10: Exciting and enjoyable combat.
An example of melee combat from the showcase.
I’ve usually enjoyed combat encounters in The Elder Scrolls games, particularly melee combat with swords, axes, spears, and the like. But Bethesda’s Fallout duology hasn’t always gotten its gunplay right. In Bethesda’s single-player Fallout titles, the VATS system paused the game to allow for targeting, and that went a long way to covering up what was pretty mediocre shooting and gunplay.
When VATS couldn’t be implemented in Fallout 76 – because of the game’s multiplayer nature – Bethesda’s sub-par shooting was laid bare. What we’ve seen of Starfield’s gunplay looks impressive so far, but again that comes with the caveat that everything we’ve been shown is carefully-edited marketing material that may not ultimately prove to be representative of the finished game.
Firing a pistol/handgun in Starfield.
Todd Howard confirmed that Bethesda has worked with fellow ZeniMax studio id Software on elements of Starfield, and the famed developer of the Doom series – including the recent highly-praised titles Doom and Doom Eternal – would definitely have a lot to offer. Some of Starfield’s shooting looked to draw inspiration from those recent Doom games.
At the end of the day, all we really need is for shooting to be competent. It won’t be the main focus of Starfield for the most part, but when combat encounters arise, they need to be basically fun to play and not frustrating! In a role-playing game with different playstyles and options, different kinds of weapons need to behave differently from one another, too.
So that’s it!
Using a mining laser.
Those are ten of my Starfield wishes!
In an ideal world, the game would do everything I want! But even if none of the things we’ve talked about today come to pass, I’m still hoping for a fun and enjoyable game. Maybe Starfield won’t be the best game of all-time… but as long as it has some of that Bethesda magic, and some decent systems and mechanics that don’t get in the way, I daresay it’ll be good enough to keep my attention and focus for a time this autumn.
I really am trying not to get too carried away. It’s hard, though, because I don’t think I’ve been this excited about a game since Bethesda’s own Morrowindmore than twenty years ago. If you asked me to describe my idea of an “ideal game,” many of the things I’d choose to include have already been confirmed to be part of Starfield.
One of the available companions.
In a broader sense, Starfield feels like the game I’ve been waiting decades to play, ever since I first played games like Star Trek: Starship Creator, Star Fox on the Super Nintendo, and first-person shooters like the original Doom, System Shock, and Elite Force. I’m trying not to place too high a bar on Starfield… but I can’t deny how excited I am!
Every time I think I’ve ran out of things to say about Starfield, I find at least one more thing to comment on! So I hope you’ll stay tuned here on the website, because I may have something else to say about the game before too long. When Starfield is released, I’ll also do my best to share my first impressions and my thoughts about the game and its various systems and gameplay mechanics, so definitely check back for all of that later in the year.
Until then, I hope this wishlist was a bit of fun!
Starfield will be released on the 6th of September 2023 for PC and Xbox Series S/X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Although there are no major story spoilers for Starfield, minor spoilers may be present. This article also uses screenshots and promotional artwork of the game.
I touched on this subject when I gave my thoughts on the recent Starfield showcase, but I wanted to expand on some of my concerns about Bethesda’s upcoming sci-fi role-playing game. For context, Starfield is absolutely my most-anticipated game right now, and it’s one I’m very excited about! The hype train has definitely left the station, and I’m going to be riding it until September!
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t concerns to be addressed. Some of these are things we can’t know or won’t get to see until Starfield is released, but others are things that Bethesda can – and really ought to – begin to address right away, before things get out of hand. We saw with Cyberpunk 2077 how dangerous an ever-growing hype bubble can be, and it doesn’t serve any game if players are allowed free rein to speculate and build up an inaccurate and even impossible picture of what it could be.
An unknown character seen in the recent Starfield showcase.
That’s perhaps my single greatest concern: that Bethesda and Microsoft aren’t doing enough to step in when speculation gets wild. I’ve seen commentators and critics propose entirely unannounced features that are almost certainly not going to be included in Starfield, dedicating entire forum threads or YouTube videos to discussing them. Theorising can be fun, but there’s a line somewhere that falls in between speculating about what might be present and convincing oneself (and others) that an exciting-sounding feature is certain to be included.
This is where a good marketing department is essential! There are ways to let players down gently, or to redirect the conversation to other areas of the game, without deflating the hype bubble or crushing players’ expectations. It’s infinitely better to do so at this stage, months before the game is launched, rather than attempting to clean up ambiguous statements and explain the lack of features fans felt certain they’d get to see after a rocky release.
Todd Howard, executive producer at Bethesda and director of Starfield.
In different ways, this is basically what tripped up Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky. Both games were subject to intense criticism and even hate upon release, and while Cyberpunk 2077 in particular suffered from being in an incomplete state, both games had been over-sold. In both cases, marketing departments seemed incapable of saying “no,” promising players a genre-busting, once-in-a-lifetime experience that no game could ever hope to live up to. When it turned out that No Man’s Sky was pretty barebones and barren, and that Cyberpunk 2077 was so unfinished that many folks found it to be unplayable, the dejection that players felt as they fell back to Earth was unparalleled. They’d been promised something special, but all they found when the dust had settled was a sense of crushing disappointment.
Starfield is absolutely in danger of doing this. There are going to be limitations within the game: limited NPC numbers, limited character traits and skills to choose from, limits to customisation for spaceships and the player character, limits on exploration, and limits to the role-playing experience. It’s essential that Bethesda and Microsoft use the next few months wisely, setting appropriate expectations and not allowing players to build up an image of Starfield in their heads that the game could never live up to.
Spaceship customisation is sure to have its limits.
Let’s talk about the size of Starfield itself. With 1,000 explorable planets being promised, I can’t be the only one who thinks that Bethesda might’ve made the game too big… can I? Don’t get me wrong, it’s essential that Starfield’s galaxy feels expansive, and if exploration, mining, and resource collection are going to be key parts of gameplay, it’s important to ensure there’s enough space to do all of those things. But 1,000 planets seems like a lot – arguably too many for any one player to even visit, let alone explore thoroughly in a single playthrough.
With the way Starfield’s procedural generation has been described, there’s a risk that players will miss things, too. If some characters, locations, and even missions are randomly assigned to planets, there’s only a one-in-one-thousand chance of finding a particular mission on a particular world. That potentially means that Starfield will be awkward to replay, or that it will be difficult for players to try out a mission that they’ve seen or to share something exciting with their friends.
A close-up scan of a planet.
In Fallout 4 or Skyrim, every single player could go to the same point on the map and encounter the same NPC or start the same quest. But that won’t be possible in Starfield – which is fun in some ways, but could become frustrating. If players find a fun quest or a useful item on one playthrough, locating it again on another save file could be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. That can be fun in some cases… but it will definitely be frustrating in others.
Some of the planets shown off in the Starfield showcase also looked pretty flat and barren. One of the key marketing lines is “if you can see it you can go there,” with words to that effect being used in reference to a moon in orbit of a planet. But here’s the thing: if that moon or planet has nothing of note except, perhaps, for some crafting resources to collect… going there won’t actually be a lot of fun.
Some of these planets look lifeless and barren.
For all the talk of Starfield having 1,000 planets, only a handful of those – perhaps a dozen at most – are going to have a significant amount of content. Whether we’re talking about small settlements, villains’ lairs, shipwrecks to scavenge, random character encounters, ruins, or other hallmarks of exploration in a Bethesda game… there’s only going to be so many of those. My fear here is that 1,000 planets might spread this content too thin, leaving swathes of the galaxy feeling empty.
There was also talk of planets consisting of “puzzle pieces” – i.e. hand-made pieces of content stitched together at random. That seems to solve one problem, but might it create another? Unless Bethesda has created enough of these puzzle pieces to make each planet totally unique, at some point is there not a danger that they’ll have to be recycled? It would be immersion-breaking to land on a planet and see the exact same mountain or ruin as we’d just been exploring somewhere else.
The map, focusing on a single solar system.
I don’t think that Bethesda has done enough to allay some of these concerns about the scale of the map and the amount of content it may contain. One of the criticisms of No Man’s Sky when that game launched was that its planets felt empty – and outside of some of the main settlements and story locations, I’m just not sure how Bethesda will get around this.
Starfield will be Bethesda’s biggest game to date, with some reports suggesting it may have twice as much recorded dialogue as Fallout 4. Fallout 4 had close to 700 non-player characters, but even if we generously assume that Starfield might have as many as 2,000, that still spreads them out very thinly. Even more so if we assume that the three major settlements we know of will congregate a lot of NPCs in one place.
Sarah Morgan, one of the game’s important non-player characters.
Complaining that a space game is “too big” seems silly – and I freely admit that. But my concern is less to do with the size of the map itself and more with the amount of content relative to the size of the map. One of my main complaints about Fallout 76 was that its open world felt utterly lifeless due to the complete lack of non-player characters to engage with… and outside of settlements and space stations, I just fear that parts of Starfield’s galaxy could fall into the same trap.
The game is going to clock in at a whopping 125GB – at least on PC. That sounds huge, but when you compare it to other modern games, it actually isn’t. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is comparable in size, for example, as is Red Dead Redemption II. Now don’t get me wrong, I adore Red Dead Redemption II’s open world – but is its patch of the wild west in the 19th Century a fair comparison with Starfield’s 1,000 planets? Again, my concern is really the amount of enjoyable content relative to the size of the map.
Starfield’s system requirements. Image Credit: Steam/ZeniMax
Let’s hop over to the character creator now. This might seem like a nitpick, and as facial hair is something I seldom use on custom characters, it isn’t something that will affect my own playthrough. But the facial hair in Starfield’s character creator… well, it just looks a bit shit, doesn’t it? I’m not the only one who thinks so, surely. In fact, I’d go so far as to call facial hair the worst-looking part of Starfield that we’ve been shown so far, and on some character models it seriously detracted from the way they looked, dropping the realism down several notches.
Hair and hairstyles looked pretty good, with a variety of hair types and styles that should allow players to create a diverse array of characters. That’s fabulous – but it raises the question of why facial hair is struggling to hit that same level of quality. This is something past Bethesda games have struggled with, too – Oblivion most notably, but also Skyrim and the Fallouts to a lesser extent.
Facial hair does not look great in Starfield.
I fear that facial hair may be the first outward sign of another of my big worries: Starfield’s game engine. Bethesda has insisted on using their proprietary Creation Engine 2 for Starfield – but the underlying technology here is more than twenty years old. The core technology of Creation Engine 2 is Morrowind’s Gamebryo, a piece of kit that Bethesda has literally been using since the late ’90s when that game first entered development. Changes and additions have been made, but this technology has its limits. The facial hair problem, which is a hallmark of prior Bethesda titles, could be the canary in the coal mine here.
There are advantages to working with a familiar toolkit. If Starfield had been built on, say, Unreal Engine 4 or 5, it would have required a completely different development cycle, with a different team who were familiar with how that technology worked. I’m not saying that would have been better, and I’m not arguing in favour of any one of the well-known game engines that other modern titles use. There are drawbacks and disadvantages to working with practically all of them.
Starfield’s game engine uses the same core technology that Bethesda has relied on since Morrowind.
But what I am saying is that Bethesda’s technology is at best untested on a title this massive. Some of the in-game features and mechanics promised for Starfield, such as spaceflight and ship-to-ship combat, have never been done before in any form of Gamebryo or the Creation Engine. That’s one concern.
Then there are things that have been done before – but haven’t always been done particularly well. I noted in my piece on the Starfield showcase how impressed I was with the gunplay. Partly that’s because gunplay in Bethesda’s Fallout duology was pretty poor without those games’ signature VATS system covering for it. An update to the engine should allow for significant improvements in that area, but again this is something that’s untested, and something like shooting can be difficult to judge from compressed YouTube video footage – especially carefully-edited marketing bumf. Any developer worth their salt can make even the most lacklustre game look fast-paced, fluid, and exciting in their own marketing material.
Gunplay looked great in the showcase.
Bethesda has earned itself a reputation among players for releasing games bedevilled by glitches and bugs. The company wouldn’t be the first to release a broken, buggy game in 2023 – but that’s no excuse! I’ve already said that Starfield is a game that I’ll be waiting to see reviews and tech breakdowns of before I commit myself, and that’s because Bethesda has done so much to warrant such a cautious approach.
Look back to trailers and marketing material shown off for Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020. Or Redfall earlier this year. It’s easy for a clever publisher to compile footage – even in-game footage – that looks great, and to show off a “vision” for how the game could look under the right circumstances. Trailers, teasers, and gameplay reveals often turn out to be inaccurate, and the version of a game that arrives on launch day – or during a pre-order exclusive access window – can be a million miles away from how it was promised or presented. Bethesda has done this too, with Fallout 4 and especially Fallout 76 receiving well-deserved criticism for bugs and glitches when they were released.
Fallout 76 at launch had, uh, a few issues…
There’s a specific story concern that I have – one that hadn’t even entered my mind until someone commented on it somewhere online. I can’t remember where I first saw this idea or theory posited, so I apologise to its original creator for that! But several people have suggested that Starfield could be some kind of sequel to the Fallout series – noting in particular that Earth looks barren, devastated, and uninhabitable in teases we’ve been shown… not unlike Fallout’s nuclear wasteland.
To be clear, there’s no indication whatsoever that this will be the case. Bethesda hasn’t denied it outright, but they haven’t actually commented on it at all as far as I can tell.
For my money, this would be an atrocious idea. Even if this was a secret that was kept, with the player character not finding out until well into the main story… it just wouldn’t work. It would make Starfield feel diminished, living in the shadow of another game – and it just isn’t necessary. Starfield can and should stand on its own two feet, doing its own thing, and not needing to be constrained by other games in a different fictional universe.
This is one rumour I hope proves to be false.
After Starfield is launched, a lot of attention will be paid to how well the game sells. But as I’ve said before, in an era where Game Pass has tens of millions of paid subscribers, sales numbers no longer tell the full story. I fully expect the PlayStation fanboys to jump all over Starfield – as they are already for any point of criticism they can find – and if the game seems to be selling fewer copies than other Bethesda games or than comparable PlayStation 5 games, you can bet they’ll take that and run with it. There’s sure to be content proclaiming Starfield a “failure” no matter what happens!
But it isn’t fair to judge Starfield – nor any Microsoft or Xbox game – purely on sales numbers any more. Game Pass is a game changer; it’s quite literally changing the way many of us play games. The way players on Xbox and PC engage with Bethesda titles and other Microsoft-owned games and studios is changing rapidly, with more and more subscribers joining Game Pass every day. Starfield’s release is sure to see a spike in Game Pass numbers, too – because it makes a lot of sense from a player’s perspective! I’ll be playing Starfield on Game Pass, and several people I know will be doing the same thing. Each Game Pass player represents a sale not made – so look to Microsoft and Bethesda for player numbers rather than raw sales data.
Starfield is a big deal for Game Pass.
Speaking of sales and money, another area of concern is that Starfield seems to be quite aggressively chasing some recent cash-grabbing trends that have blighted the modern games industry. It was a given that Starfield would have a collector’s edition and a special edition at launch – such things are so commonplace nowadays that they don’t even raise an eyebrow. But I admit that I was a little surprised at how steep the price was and what kind of content was on offer.
Firstly, for an additional £25 – on top of Starfield’s £60 (US$70) price tag – players get a couple of skins, a digital soundtrack, an “art book,” which will be a collection of JPEG images of the game’s concept art, and access to the first piece of planned DLC. We’ll get to DLC in a moment, but there’s one more thing that pre-ordering this expensive special edition gets players: five days of early access to the game.
Starfield has a special edition – because of course it does.
Let’s look at this another way: Starfield’s release date isn’t the 6th of September, it’s the 1st of September – but only for players who splurge some extra cash. The rest of us plebs will have to wait five days, close to a week, in order to play the game. I find these kinds of paid access periods to be a particularly revolting way of monetising a game, and I’m disappointed that Microsoft and Bethesda would stoop so low in order to manipulate players into pre-ordering Starfield.
Then we have these character costumes. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I fear these paid outfits are a harbinger of some aggressive in-game monetisation. This might be something that’s already present in Starfield, or it might be something Bethesda plans to implement after the game’s release – but either way, it doesn’t bode well. A fully-priced game shouldn’t be selling costumes like it’s some free-to-play MMO, but the games industry has been getting away with more and more of this kind of aggressive in-game thievery. And Bethesda is one of the pioneers of this nonsense, with Oblivion’s infamous “horse armour” DLC.
Yup.
If I’m paying £60 – or £85 – for a game, I should expect to be able to equip my character with all of the costumes that the game has to offer. This isn’t Roblox or Fortnite; free-to-play titles that use in-game purchases and subscriptions to turn a profit. For the money Bethesda and Microsoft are demanding, it’s positively disgusting to think that some character outfits – and possibly other pieces of content too – have been cut out to be sold separately.
I mentioned the first expansion pack there, too, and this is another thing that’s ringing alarm bells. Starfield is still almost three months away from release – this is not the time to be talking publicly about expansion packs and DLC. It worries me that attention and development resources may be diverted away from what should be Bethesda’s top priority: getting the game ready for launch. DLC is great – and if Starfield is as amazing an experience as we’re all hoping for, I’ll definitely be picking up every major expansion pack that gets released! But now is not the moment to be advertising it.
Let’s get the game launched before we talk about DLC.
I do have one final point of concern before we wrap things up. Since the Starfield showcase was broadcast, hype for the game has gone way up. Players like myself who had been on the fence about Starfield or who were tentatively looking forward to it have now well and truly boarded the hype train – and that brings with it a degree of expectation. Microsoft and Bethesda have promised a release date of the 6th of September (or the 1st for people who pay up). There’s now more pressure than ever to meet that deadline.
That means two things. First of all, crunch. Having once worked in the games industry, I’ve seen crunch first-hand, and I know the toll it can take on developers and everyone working at a games company. Crunch is something that should be avoided at all costs – but rigid deadlines make it far more likely.
It’s on Bethesda (and Microsoft) to avoid a difficult crunch period.
Secondly, Microsoft and Bethesda are now far less likely to delay Starfield. The game has already been delayed twice officially – or four times unofficially, if you believe certain reports. If Starfield isn’t ready in time for September, there’s going to be a lot of pressure for the game to be pushed out anyway – and that could be disastrous. Look at Cyberpunk 2077, a game which, despite pulling off an admirable recovery, will be forever tainted in the minds of players by an atrocious launch. Likewise No Man’s Sky. And for every game like those that manage to recover, there are dozens of titles like Anthem, Babylon’s Fall, or 2013’s Star Trek that never do. Bethesda has some experience in this field, both with Fallout 76 and as the publisher responsible for this year’s Redfall.
I praised Starfield last year for being delayed. I stand by what I said then: it’s never fun when a game I’m excited for gets delayed, but more and more players have the maturity to understand that it can be necessary. Practically everyone would rather play a good game a few months later than a bad, broken, or unfinished game a few months earlier. But with so much hype building up and a release date seemingly set in stone, a further delay at this stage might be something that Microsoft and Bethesda are unwilling to consider. I hope that, if Starfield needs a few more weeks or even a few more months, that they will ultimately be willing to take that tough decision.
A spaceship!
So I think that’s all I have to say for now. I know it’s a lot – and if you feel like I just took a big stinking dump all over your excitement for Starfield, well… sorry!
Despite everything we’ve discussed today, I’m still incredibly excited for Starfield. I’m trying to restrain myself and not get overly hyped up – and that’s partly why I decided to put metaphorical pen to paper and write out all of my concerns and issues with the game. But the truth is that in spite of some worries and fears, I’m still really looking forward to this game. In fact, I can’t think of any other title since Bethesda’s own Morrowindmore than two decades ago that I’ve been this excited to play for myself.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed, and I truly hope that all of the points I’ve raised today will turn out to be misplaced fears. In three months’ time, feel free to come back and have a good laugh at my expense if Starfield really does live up to our expectations! I know that’s what I’ll do… if I’m not too busy playing Starfield, of course.
Starfield will be released on the 6th of September 2023 for PC and Xbox Series S/X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda and IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Although there are no major spoilers for Starfield’s main story, minor spoilers may be present – and this article includes screenshots and images of the game.
As part of Xbox’s big summer event – or rather, as a standalone addendum to it – Bethesda recently showed off the first proper deep dive into its upcoming role-playing shooter Starfield. The game is due for release in September, barring any further delays, and today I wanted to share my thoughts on how Starfield looks to be shaping up!
It’s been a while since we last took a look at Starfield here on the website. In fact, it’s been over a year since I last commented on the game at length – a piece that was prompted by news that it had been delayed. A single teaser trailer had been released since that announcement, but this showcase offers a much deeper and more expansive look at the game.
The game’s director and Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard spoke at the Starfield showcase.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t excited for Starfield – even more so knowing that it will come to Game Pass on day one. The game that Bethesda showed off and talked about looks fantastic, with a multitude of complex systems and mechanics to get stuck into, and an engaging retro-sci-fi story that I can’t wait to follow.
But at the same time, hype isn’t always a positive thing – and I’ve already seen players and commentators starting to speculate about unannounced features in the game, potentially setting themselves up for disappointment. I’m trying to restrain myself from doing the exact same thing; building up an image in my head of the “perfect” role-playing game that Starfield – and indeed no game – could ever possibly live up to.
Concept art for Starfield.
Bethesda’s games are fantastic. Morrowind in particular will be a permanent fixture on my “favourite games of all-time” list, and I’ve also enjoyed Bethesda’s other modern titles like Skyrim and their Fallout duology. But the company has a reputation, and mistakes have been made over the past few years that are absolutely worth bearing in mind before the Starfield hype train accelerates too much.
Fallout 76 was, for me at least, utterly unplayable. Forget the bugs, the glitches, and the crappy marketing – it was a role-playing game with no characters in it. To Bethesda’s credit they’ve been continuing to work on Fallout 76, but it was a mistake to launch the game in such an unfinished state. Fallout 4 also had its issues – particularly with bland and repetitive side-quests and open-world busywork. And we’d be remiss not to mention the fact that Bethesda’s publishing arm is responsible for such recent abominations as Redfall.
Fallout 76 was a big, empty game that had a very difficult launch.
Even Bethesda’s better titles have a reputation for being buggy at launch – and with Starfield being the company’s biggest release to date, the potential for bugs and glitches to sneak through quality control is off the charts! The game has been delayed from an initial November 2022 release, first to “the first half of 2023,” and then again to September. Delays are almost always good news – but there can be pressure to meet a deadline, especially one that’s been pushed back more than once.
I’d absolutely encourage Bethesda, Microsoft, and anyone who’ll listen to consider delaying Starfield again if the game needs it. The gameplay we got to see in the showcase looked smooth, fun, and bug-free – but any developer worth their salt can create a “vertical slice” of gameplay for a presentation like this. Until the game is actually in the hands of independent reviewers, analysts, and of course players, we won’t be able to say with certainty that it’s in a good enough state.
A mining laser as seen in the Starfield showcase.
There are other concerns I have, too. Bethesda has insisted on re-using their creaking, ageing game engine for Starfield. Creation Engine 2 is a modified, updated version of Bethesda’s old Creation Engine, itself a modified version of Gamebryo. In some form, Bethesda has been using this same technology since the Morrowind days, and I fear that we’ve already seen some of the limitations of Creation Engine 2 in the showcase itself. Look, for example, at the low-quality facial hair and beards present on some characters – this is a hallmark of Gamebryo/Creation Engine, as we’ve seen similar shortcomings in other Bethesda titles.
The Creation Engine was originally designed for role-playing games – not space combat or colony-building, two elements of Starfield that have been teased. Fallout 4′s settlement-building was good – but it had its limitations and could be clunky to work with, especially for new players. Spaceflight and ship-to-ship combat are entirely new for Bethesda in this context, and again there’s a concern about how well Starfield’s underlying technology can deal with that.
It’s an open question as to how well the Creation Engine can handle all of these new gameplay mechanics.
Then there’s the idea of procedurally-generated planets. Procedural generation will allow Starfield to be far larger than any hand-crafted game could ever be… but it has its limits. No Man’s Sky is the title many folks will call to mind when thinking of procedural generation in a space-adventure title, and while that game has pulled off an amazing recovery following a rocky launch… it’s not exactly a comparison that Bethesda would be thrilled to see.
There were a few moments in the showcase where I felt that player characters were gazing out over pretty barren, uninteresting landscapes and vistas. For all the proclamations of “if you can see it, you can go there,” if “there” is an empty wasteland, a barren patch of dirt, or a procedurally-generated mountain with nothing at all to see or do… then I’m sure I won’t be alone in saying I don’t think I’ll bother!
A beautifully-rendered but barren-looking planet.
This is perhaps another case of expectations being raised that can’t be met. Starfield may indeed have 1,000 planets to visit – but only a handful are going to be worth visiting, with solid missions, story content, non-player characters, and hand-crafted locales to explore. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe Bethesda has found a way to take procedural generation to another level. I hope so! But I’m not convinced of that yet.
I was also not thrilled to see two things as the showcase drew to a close: a timed early-access release for players who pay an extra £25/$30, and talk of a “story expansion” already. Bethesda has created some wonderful expansions and pieces of DLC in the past for all of its games… but it’s premature to be talking about that at this juncture. Let’s worry about getting the game released first!
Starfield has a “digital premium edition” with extra content and early access.
There were also some pre-order exclusive costumes and outfits, and I sincerely hope that won’t be a trend that Starfield aggressively pursues. We’ve seen too many single-player, fully-priced games trying to sell microtransactions and cosmetic items via an in-game marketplace, and to me that kind of thing crosses a line. In a free-to-play title, sure. Go for it. But let’s not have that nonsense in Starfield.
So those are my negative takeaways from the showcase, and I wanted to get them out of the way up front! There are concerns about Starfield, and as excited as I am for the game, it’s another one that has firmly earned its place in the “wait for the reviews” column!
But there’s a lot more to say about Starfield, and I have some very positive impressions and takeaways from the showcase that I’d like to share now.
Concept art of a neon marketplace.
First of all, this game is giving me a “Star Trek-meets-Disney World-meets-old-school sci-fi” vibe! The positivity of Star Trek’s exploration-focused future seemed to be present, and as a massive Trekkie I’m all there for that! Bethesda once had the license to make Star Trek games, and I can’t help but feel that in another world we might be looking at Starfield Trek… or should that be Star Trekfield? Maybe one day Paramount will license a game like that! A fan can dream, eh?
If you’ve ever been to Disney World and ridden the likes of Spaceship Earth or visited Tomorrowland, maybe you’ll also pick up on the same feeling that I did. Perhaps it’s because of the aesthetic, perhaps it was the talk of humanity expanding into the stars, but something in the showcase absolutely harkened back to those Disney experiences for me – and I absolutely mean that as a positive thing.
Paging Mr Morrow…
Finally we have Starfield’s deliberately retro look and feel. Described by Bethesda as “NASA-punk,” this visual style takes NASA’s technology as a starting point and looks to a future inspired by those machines and devices – and their aesthetic – in much the same way as the Fallout games take the early ’50s as inspiration. I adore this look, and while there’s more to Starfield’s galaxy than just one visual style, it seems to fit perfectly with the game’s theme of exploration.
Each faction, locale, and/or area of the galaxy looks to have its own distinct aesthetic, too, which is fantastic. In Morrowind, and to an extent in Oblivion as well, different regions of the map and factions were distinct from one another with radically different styles of dress and architecture. This was far less visible in Skyrim, and while there were distinctive looks in Bethesda’s Fallout games too, by and large those titles had their own post-apocalyptic thing going on that tamped down at least some of the potential for creativity and diversity in terms of style. Starfield doesn’t have that – and it was fantastic to see different cities, different factions, and different characters with pretty diverse styles that complimented or clashed with the “NASA-punk” look of the main character and spaceship.
Starfield has a visual style that Bethesda calls “NASA-punk.”
Let’s talk a bit more about spaceships – because this is one area where I’m beyond excited. With the caveat above about the game’s engine being relatively untested in this area, the idea of building, customising, living aboard, and finding a crew for my very own starship is something I literally cannot wait to get stuck into. Starfield is making my knickers moist with anticipation; this is something I’ve been looking for in a game of this type for a long time.
I adore customisation options in practically any game, and there have been some fun games with base-building elements. Going way back, there are even games like Star Trek: Starship Creator, which, while limited by the technology of the time, were an absolute blast to get stuck into. But being able to build and customise a ship, recruit a crew, and then take that ship on untold adventures in a Bethesda sandbox… I can hardly think of anything more appealing in any video game that has ever been announced in the history of ever!
Spaceship!
At first it seemed as if this feature might be akin to Fallout 4′s settlement-building in the sense that it would feel tacked-on, and like a part of gameplay that could be sidelined or even ignored. And I suppose some players will choose to do the bare minimum when it comes to spaceship customisation, putting their focus into the story or into side-missions. But from what we saw in the showcase – and again, with the caveat that all of this is heavily-edited marketing bumf – it looks like the player’s ship is going to be an integral part of the game. Maintaining it, upgrading it, and finding a good crew will all have tangible effects on gameplay – making space battles easier to win and potentially even unlocking new areas of the galaxy and new planets to explore.
It seems as though there will be a choice of crewmates; this isn’t a Mass Effect situation where there are only handful of characters who could join the squad. Bethesda games have had companions in the past, but I usually found them to be quite limited in what they could do. If each member of the crew brings skills with them when they join up, that completely reframes the entire concept of companions – and makes it way more interesting. That at least some of these people can be found randomly out in the wild is even more enticing!
Ship customisation looks amazing.
My excitement about building my own starship extends to the colony/base-building feature, too. Again, this looks like a ton of fun, and provided that there are enough customisation options – and that things like colours can be changed inside as well as out – it will be an absolute blast to get stuck into. Being able to set up a base on a random planet or moon… again, I feel like this is as close as I’m ever going to get to living out my Star Trek/Disney/retro-sci-fi fantasy!
The game’s character customiser looked good – but as I said above, facial hair seems not to be as well-done in Starfield as we’ve seen it in other modern titles. That’s unlikely to affect my own custom character, but it’s worth noting regardless. I don’t think the character creator will quite match the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, which probably has the best on the market right now, but it should be a solid next-gen improvement over even Fallout 4, which had been Bethesda’s best to date. As long as I have a decent range of options to pick from, I daresay I’ll be satisfied!
The character creator. Note the low-quality facial hair.
Starfield will have two different kinds of combat: ship-to-ship in space and first/third-person on the ground. It can be difficult to tell from compressed video how well these will work, but the signs from the showcase were positive – at least as far as I can tell. Some of Starfield’s combat looked positively Doom-like – thanks, no doubt, to support from Doom developer (and fellow ZeniMax studio) id Software. Gunplay looked fast-paced and fluid, and I even caught a glimpse of some melee weapons in the mix, too.
Combat – and especially firearm combat – had been a bit of a concern. In the Fallout series, the VATS system, which essentially paused gameplay to allow for targeting, went a long way to covering up some decidedly average or even sub-par gunplay. This came to the fore with Fallout 76, which as an online multiplayer title couldn’t implement VATS in the same way. Gunplay in Starfield looks a million miles away from the lacklustre shooting seen in Fallout 76, which is fantastic.
Melee weapons are present in Starfield.
Ship-to-ship space combat reminded me of Everspace 2 and even No Man’s Sky in the way it appeared at the showcase. That’s a compliment – as both games are easy to get to grips with! For players who want to focus less on spaceship battles and more on piloting and exploration, or who see going to space as merely a way to travel to the next destination, ensuring that these combat sequences don’t feel awkward and annoying is a must. I can think of a fair few titles where these kinds of sequences could feel like they got in the way – and I hope Starfield won’t be one of them!
Having gone to all of the trouble of customising and stocking up my ship, it’ll be a treat to see it zooming around in space! If the ship-to-ship combat is as fun and fluid as the first-person shooting looks set to be, then I think this aspect of the game will be fantastic, too. Again, diversity and player choice are on full display here: piracy is an option, raiding other ships. Trading and even smuggling are available, too. And of course, exploration! It sounds like there will be a ton of different ways to use these ships – and yes, that’s ships plural, as it was confirmed that players can acquire more than one vessel.
A spaceship in orbit of a planet.
After the disappointment of Fallout 76′s big, empty world, it was phenomenal to see so many non-player characters milling around. Several of the locales shown off in the showcase look like big, bustling cities, filled to the brim with people. Smaller settlements also seemed to be populated, and as mentioned above, some of these characters can be recruited to join the crew. I don’t know how many potential crewmates there are, but it was implied to be a decent number.
Characters are at the heart of any story, and Bethesda has created some incredibly fun and memorable characters over the years. I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing what they’ve done in the sci-fi space, and all the different kinds of people we might meet. We’ve already seen some of the members of the Constellation organisation – but in a galaxy filled with corporations, pirates, colonists, independent worlds, and so on… there should be a lot of people to meet!
Sarah Morgan is one of the members of the Constellation organisation.
Starfield’s main storyline is still under wraps, but we got a few tidbits of information at the showcase. The Constellation organisation appears to be in decline, and the player character had a unique connection with an artefact of unknown origin – possibly created by ancient aliens. This idea seems like something that has the potential to be fun and engaging! But as with other Bethesda games, the main quest is sure to be only a small part of what Starfield has to offer.
I first played Morrowindmore than twenty years ago, shortly after it was released here in the UK. In that time I’ve returned to the game on multiple occasions – but I still to this day haven’t seen everything or beaten every side-quest. That’s the kind of scope we’re talking about here, and with Starfield promising to be Bethesda’s biggest game ever, there are bound to be factions to join, side-missions to complete, and entire quest lines that are of comparable length to the game’s main story. For many folks – myself included – this is the appeal of Bethesda titles, and thus is the true appeal of Starfield.
Who’s this and what’s his story?
All of the usual Bethesda skills and perks looked to be present in Starfield – along with plenty of new ones, too. Character customisation goes way beyond appearance, and from what we saw in the showcase, players are going to be able to really decide what kind of person they want to be in this sci-fi world – and what kind of gameplay they want to have! I noted options that build up stealth, physical attributes, weapons, engineering, piloting, charisma, and more. And as in any RPG, choosing one set of skills or perks will mean others aren’t available – making Starfield a game with huge replayability potential.
I like tinkering with stats in a good role-playing game, and I hope that Starfield’s skills and perks will be both fun to use and will have a meaningful impact on the game. Some games rightly attract criticism for skills and stats having little functional effect on gameplay – though Bethesda has usually managed to get this right. There were some interesting and unique-sounding skills and perks in the mix, too, including some that seemed to unlock potential characters, dialogue options, and story elements.
Part of the skills menu.
So we’ll have to wrap things up, because this is already running long!
I’m trying hard to suppress as much of my hype and excitement for Starfield as possible. Not only are there concerns about the game engine, Bethesda’s reputation for bugs and glitches, pre-order and monetisation shenanigans, and other things on the technical side, but there’s a very real danger that Bethesda is overplaying its hand. Starfield is being pitched as a kind of genre-busting, once-in-a-lifetime experience… and many players may find themselves falling back to Earth with a thud if the game can’t live up to those impossible expectations.
There are going to be limits to customisation, procedurally-generated locations that may be barren, bland, and less exciting than we’d hoped for, and constraints on what’s possible in terms of both gameplay and story. Both Bethesda and Xbox have track records of poor launches, with Fallout 76 being an unparalleled disaster in 2018, and Redfall being a total mess earlier this year. So there are solid reasons to place Starfield in the “wait for the reviews” category!
Concept art of an outpost or spaceship.
But at the same time, I can’t help myself. A friend of mine recently suggested that Starfield might just be “the best video game that either of us will ever play,” and I can’t argue with their assessment. If Starfield lives up to the hype and the expectations that Microsoft and Bethesda are setting, then it almost certainly will be one of my favourite gaming experiences of the last few years – if not of all-time. I’ve been waiting for a game like this; one that promises to be multiple games with multiple gameplay mechanics all rolled into one.
The showcase did its job, in my view. It succeeded at getting me incredibly excited for Starfield, a title that was already close to the top of my most-anticipated games list. Part of me is saying “please delay it if it needs it!” But another huge part of me wants nothing more than to get my hands on Starfield right now! I don’t think I’ve been this excited about an upcoming game since Morrowind.
Starfield will be released on the 6th of September 2023 for PC and Xbox Series S/X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda and IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Microsoft recently talked about the success of its Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass subscription services – which between them have somewhere in the region of 30 million subscribers. However, this was accompanied by news from Microsoft that sales on its Xbox platform are down, with some big games not selling as many copies as they might’ve been expected to in years past.
Some outlets and commentators have seized upon this news in a pretty bizarre way, trying to present Game Pass as some kind of “problem” for Xbox and Microsoft, even going so far as to say that Game Pass is “harming” the company. But… Game Pass was designed to lead to fewer sales. It’s something that’s baked into the subscription model. To use a bit of game dev lingo: it’s a feature, not a bug.
An example of the kind of reactions we’re talking about. Image: DreamcastGuy via YouTube
Saying that Game Pass is “harming” sales of games on PC and Xbox is like saying Netflix is harmful to sales of films on VHS, or that Spotify has led to fewer cassettes being sold. The entire point of creating a subscription is to sign people up for the long-term. There are legitimate questions about the viability of the subscription model in the video gaming space, because it’s new and relatively untested. But to say that it’s “harmful” to game sales is, in my view anyway, entirely missing the point.
Consider what Microsoft’s objective is with Game Pass. They hope to create a “Netflix of video games,” where players sign up and remain subscribed for the long haul, playing the games they want as they become available. It’s intended to work in a similar way to the way subscription services work with other forms of media. By definition, that means fewer physical and digital sales. Microsoft will have known this going in, and fully expected it.
Game Pass is shaking up the industry.
Microsoft sees an opportunity to make the Game Pass model the future of gaming. Rather than buying individual titles, players will pay one monthly fee and have access to a range of titles on either PC, Xbox, or both. With a linked Xbox account also tracking achievements, adding friends, and playing online, the corporation hopes that this will keep players “loyal” to their brand for console generation upon console generation.
There’s a subset of self-professed “hardcore gamers” who vocally lament the decline of physical media in gaming, and it seems to me that it’s predominantly these folks who are upset by Game Pass as a concept – and they always have been. If I may be so bold: they’re dinosaurs, and the way they like to purchase and own games is on the way out. We’ve talked about this before, but there will come a time – perhaps within just a few years – when there will no longer be anywhere to buy physical copies of games. Certainly in the area where I live, most dedicated gaming shops have already closed their doors.
There are fewer and fewer retailers like this these days.
The industry is moving on because players are moving on. The convenience of digital downloads is, for a clear majority of players, something to be celebrated. It began on PC with the likes of Steam, but now it also includes Game Pass as well as other digital shops. The way most players choose to engage with games companies is changing – and that trend shows no signs of slowing down, let alone reversing.
Maybe Game Pass won’t end up being the subscription service that takes the gaming world by storm. Perhaps some other platform will come along to dethrone it, a service that offers more games at a lower price, or one that can – somehow – be available on multiple platforms. But Game Pass is, at the very least, the canary in the coal mine: a harbinger of what’s to come.
An example of some of the titles available on Game Pass for PC.
When I see folks criticising Game Pass or trying to manufacture stories about how difficult and problematic it is for Microsoft, I feel they’re rather like the old guard of the music industry railing against people taping their favourite songs off the radio, or a DVD retailer trying to fend off the likes of Netflix and Disney+. The way people consume media – all forms of media, gaming included – is changing, and subscriptions are the current direction of travel. That’s not to say it won’t change in the future, but right now, subscriptions are where the entertainment industry is headed.
With the convenience of digital distribution, it’s hard to see a way back. Having tried Game Pass for myself, it already feels like a big ask to go back to paying £50-60 – or more, in some cases – for a single title when there are dozens available on subscription. Even just playing a couple of new games a year is still cheaper on Game Pass than buying them outright. And the more people who sign up, the more that feeling will grow. Rather than whining about Game Pass, other companies need to be taking note.
Game Pass feels like good value right now.
In the television and film space, we’re firmly in the grip of the “streaming wars,” and that has been a double-edged sword for sure. On the one hand, there’s been a glut of amazing, big-budget content as streaming platforms and the corporations backing them up continue to slog it out, competing for every subscriber. But on the other, the industry feels quite anti-consumer, with too many services charging too much money. Not all of the current streaming services will survive the decade, I am as certain of that as I can be!
But gaming has the potential to be different. Unless Microsoft gives its explicit consent, no other streaming service could set up shop on Xbox consoles, nor could anyone but Sony run a subscription for PlayStation titles. The titans of the gaming industry will continue to compete with one another, but the issue of oversaturation of the kind we’re seeing in the film and television space should be avoidable.
Sony is (belatedly) getting started with the subscription model too.
Games companies will have to adapt. Raw sales numbers are already less relevant now that Game Pass is up and running, and they’re going to be of decreasing relevance as time goes on. The way in which developers and publishers measure the success of their titles will have to change as the industry continues this shift – and the companies that get this right will reap the rewards. Those who don’t – or who try to bury their heads in the sand and pretend it’s not happening – will fall by the wayside.
The way I see it, Game Pass is just getting started. 30 million subscribers may seem like a huge number – but it’s a minuscule percentage of the total number of gamers worldwide, so there’s huge potential for growth. There will be competitors that will rise to meet it – but all that will mean is that more players, not fewer, will get roped into long-term subscriptions. We’ve already seen the beginnings of this with Nintendo Switch Online, PlayStation Plus, and even the likes of Apple Arcade on mobile.
Subscriptions like Game Pass could reach huge numbers of people.
It’s mobile phones, more than anything, that I’d argue kicked off this trend. The biggest, fastest-growing gaming platform of the last decade is entirely digital and has been since day one. Players have always accepted digital distribution on their smartphones – because it’s always been the only option. Subscription services are the natural next step – and the only surprising thing, really, is that it’s taken as long as it has for a gaming subscription to become as successful as Game Pass.
The success of Game Pass is not without pitfalls, and as I said the last time we talked about the decline of dedicated gaming shops, it will impact some people more than others. Younger people, people on low incomes (as I am myself), and others will all find that their relationships with gaming as a hobby will change as a result. Not all of these changes will be for the better for everyone, and people who aren’t able to commit to a monthly expense, or who don’t have the means to do so, risk being left behind. But many of those folks are already priced out of the gaming market, especially as companies jack up their prices to unjustifiable levels.
A closed-down games retailer in the UK.
Some of the “hot takes” on Game Pass over the past week or so have taken me by surprise – but in some cases at least, we can look to the “usual suspects” of Sony supporters and die-hard believers in the supremacy of physical media. Stirring up trouble for Game Pass and Microsoft is a hobby for some outlets!
I’m not a defender of Microsoft by any means, and the corporation has made a lot of mistakes. But Game Pass, at least at time of writing in early 2023, feels like a good deal. It has a mix of new games, older titles, and some big releases – like Halo Infinite and Starfield – come to the platform on release day. I’ve discovered games I’d never have thought to try and been able to play games I’d never have purchased entirely because of Game Pass. That undoubtedly means I’m buying fewer brand-new games… but from Microsoft’s perspective, that’s entirely the point.
Microsoft operates the Game Pass subscription service.
We should all be vigilant and not simply accept what these big corporations want to do. They’re trying to corner the market and rope players into long-term subscriptions, and they’re doing so not because they think it’s particularly beneficial to players – that’s merely a coincidence. They’re doing it to maximise profits. Not having to split the proceeds with shops or storefronts is a big part of it, and Microsoft would rather take £7.99 a month, every month, than take a cut of the profits on a single sale that it has to share with other companies.
But if this corporate skullduggery is beneficial to players, why shouldn’t we participate? An Xbox Series S or a pre-owned Xbox One combined with a Game Pass subscription is an easy and relatively affordable way into the gaming hobby – offering players a huge library of titles that would be impossibly expensive for practically all of us if we had to buy each game individually. The disadvantages are the ongoing nature of the subscription and the inevitability of titles disappearing from the service either temporarily or permanently. But them’s the breaks – that’s the nature of subscriptions across the board. And with Microsoft doing all it can to buy up companies, more and more titles will be locked into Game Pass for the long-term.
There are reasons for scepticism, sure. But trying to spin this particular issue as a negative one for Xbox and Microsoft is disingenuous. Game Pass was always going to lead to fewer game sales in the long-run. Far from worrying about this, Microsoft’s executives will be rubbing their hands together gleefully… because right now, their plan is working.
Game Pass is available now for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X. Xbox, Game Pass, and other titles discussed above are the copyright of Microsoft; other games and titles may be the copyright of their respective studio, developer, and/or publisher. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are minor spoilers ahead for Disney Dreamlight Valley.
I don’t usually go for “early access” titles. Some developers and publishers really take advantage of early access, pushing out incomplete games and getting players to effectively pay full price to do the work of a quality assurance team, and just in general, I’d rather wait until a game is ready for prime-time before sinking my energy and money into it. A title has to be something truly exceptional to attract my attention while it’s still in early access. Enter Disney Dreamlight Valley.
At time of writing in November 2022, Disney Dreamlight Valley still has some of the issues that make early access titles so offputting – major missing features, an incomplete story, and some bugs, glitches, and areas where more development time is needed to give the game some polish. But despite that, I’ve sunk more than 100 hours into the game since it launched in early access back in August, and I’ve been having a whale of a time!
The title screen as of the most recent update.
Disney Dreamlight Valley blends the customisation and design gameplay of titles like The Sims with the casual life-sim gameplay of the likes of Animal Crossing, combines those with some simple but fun nonviolent puzzle-solving gameplay, and then also throws in character-focused storytelling that can absolutely compete with any narrative game on the market – at least if you’re a Disney fan! The game’s characters, all of whom are lifted directly from Disney’s extensive back catalogue of blockbuster films, feel real and feel fun to engage with, and the game has so much to offer to kids and adults alike as a result.
As expected, recent titles like Frozen and Moana feature in a big way, but Disney Dreamlight Valley also happily incorporates characters from titles that are almost certainly less well-known nowadays (especially among younger players) like The Sword in the Stone. In fact, the very first character that players will meet upon starting a new game is Merlin – a storytelling decision that I find incredibly bold.
Mickey Mouse, a player character, and Merlin.
Unlike in games like Animal Crossing, where villagers can feel flat and repetitive after a while, the characters in Disney Dreamlight Valley feel much more complete. Partly, it must be said, that’s because they’re all familiar characters from films that most players will be familiar with, but a big part of the way they come across in the game is down to some creative quest design and some pretty good writing. Characters will also interact with one another, stopping for a casual chat that players can overhear while wandering around the valley or participating in other quests, and this small detail goes a long way to making Dreamlight Valley feel like a real place and its inhabitants like real people.
As an early access title, there are of course areas with room for improvement. But I have confidence that developers Gameloft will take player feedback on board and implement changes and fixes as they have done already. Improvements have already been made, for example, to the in-game photo mode, to the impact weather can have on the game world, to certain character interactions that players generally weren’t happy with, and much more besides. One of the advantages of early access is that developers have an opportunity to get feedback from real players – and Gameloft has certainly shown a willingness to change, adapt, and tone down different elements of the game in response.
Promo screenshot featuring Ursula.
Disney Dreamlight Valley feels like it’s also taken on board feedback and criticism of other titles in the casual life-sim genre, particularly 2020’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Complaints and criticisms about that game and how difficult it was to play long-term when compared to other Animal Crossing titles abounded, and while Disney Dreamlight Valley is still very much incomplete – multiplayer and cross-platform play have yet to be added, for example – other criticisms that I and others levelled at New Horizons simply don’t apply here. Crafting, for example, is so much easier and smoother in Disney Dreamlight Valley, and the simple fact that tools don’t need to be replaced every five minutes is fantastic!
Characters feel dynamic and respond in real-time to events in the game, and each character has their own series of quests to play through in addition to the main storyline. While there’s a case to be made that exhausting all of the quests should bring the game to an end, there are still “daily duties” – mini-quests that can involve some or all of the game’s roster of Disney characters. Moreover, when the main quests and character quests have all been completed, Disney Dreamlight Valley remains fun to play as an Animal Crossing-esque casual life-sim game; there’s still fun to be had. Racing through certain questlines is not how the game is intended to be played, and several quests have natural timers – plants that take time to grow, or objectives that can only be performed at certain times of day, for instance.
Crafting in Disney Dreamlight Valley.
Although the in-game economy works relatively well at the moment, there are potentially things that could be reworked or rebalanced in future. The titular “dreamlight,” for example, that players accumulate as a reward for accomplishing tasks and finishing quests has a limited number of uses – and when all of the different areas of the map have been unlocked, I found myself simply accumulating dreamlight by the boatload with no way to use it or spend it.
Likewise, the in-game “coins”, while slow to acquire at first, soon build up, and I found that getting a moderately decent crop farm going soon racked me up over 2 million coins – and although there are things to spend those coins on, I’ve hardly made a dent in a money vault that even Scrooge McDuck would be envious of!
Scrooge McDuck in Disney Dreamlight Valley.
While we’re on the subject of currencies, it’s clear that when Disney Dreamlight Valley exits its early access phase and goes free-to-play that a significant focus for the game will be on recurring monetisation and in-game microtransactions. Gameloft and Disney have not promised that all characters and story content will take the form of free updates, either, so there’s a risk in the longer-term that Disney Dreamlight Valley will turn into one of those titles that can be quite a money-sink. For parents of younger kids, that can absolutely be an issue, and it’s worth being aware of at this stage. While Disney Dreamlight Valley is currently quite generous with its various in-game currencies, one in particular – “moonstones” – is clearly being readied to be sold.
Moonstones can be earned in-game at time of writing, and are used to purchase cosmetic items like furniture, clothing, and motifs that can be added to custom designs. Players are also required to spend a large cache of moonstones in order to unlock more items for purchase via a kind of “season pass” that, once again, feels like it will be the target for future monetisation. Free-to-play games and ongoing “live services” require a source of income, but again it’s worth being aware even at this early stage that this is the model Disney Dreamlight Valley plans to adopt.
In-game monetisation is planned in future.
Character customisation is fun in Disney Dreamlight Valley, and I feel that there are a decent range of options including different body types, hairstyles, and so on – with some extras that can be unlocked in-game that weren’t available right at the start. There’s also a huge range of different types of furniture – many pieces of which are lifted from or inspired by modern and classic Disney films. And while there are plenty of clothes to choose from, I think I’d like to see a few more outfits and costumes that allow players to dress up as their favourite Disney characters. Some of the clothes feel a little too “generic” to me, and some of the costumes and outfits are more “inspired by” the films rather than directly taken from them. So that’s an area that I’d like to see improved upon! To give one example that may be more relevant to some fans than others, while Disney Dreamlight Valley includes a decent approximation of Princess Anna’s dress from Frozen, there really isn’t a good facsimile of Elsa’s dress from the same film, despite it being one of the most iconic of modern Disney Princess costumes.
But for the creatives among you, Disney Dreamlight Valley offers a pretty extensive customiser, allowing budding designers to create their own Disney-inspired outfits. The game includes a range of blank clothes – tops, dresses, hoodies, and even Mickey Mouse ears – that can be customised with patterns, designs, and much more. These designs are unlockable through gameplay, so the more time players invest in Disney Dreamlight Valley, the more options there will be when it comes to making fun outfits. Although I have the imagination and creativity of a colour-blind slug, even I managed to create a few fun designs with an intuitive and easy-to-use customiser.
Customising a dress in Disney Dreamlight Valley.
So that’s all there is to say for now! I may take another look at Disney Dreamlight Valley in the months ahead, perhaps when it’s ready to leave early access and go free-to-play. If you have Game Pass either for PC or Xbox, Disney Dreamlight Valley is incredibly easy to recommend. At £35/$30, there’s more than enough content to justify the price in my view – and coming in at less than “full price” is fair for a game that is still in early access and has a few issues as a result. However, despite being in early access, I found my 100+ hours with Disney Dreamlight Valley to be remarkably smooth and free from major bugs; there have only been a couple of occasions on which the game crashed, and thanks to a frequent auto-save, I didn’t even lose any progress.
There are anecdotal reports from folks who play on Nintendo Switch having a worse time with more frequent crashes and finding the game to be a less stable experience, but as I’ve played it on PC I can’t speak to that – however, it’s worth being aware of that and checking out other reviews if you plan to play on Switch.
Remy from the film Ratatouille.
For my two cents, Disney Dreamlight Valley is probably the most fun gaming experience I’ve had in 2022. For anyone who’s a Disney fan there’s a lot to love – familiar and new friends to meet and hang out with in a game that blends both narrative storytelling and casual life-simulation. I haven’t seen some of the newer films from which some characters were taken (Remy from Ratatouille and the titular Wall-E were both new to me) but even with that limitation, I had a whale of a time.
Disney Dreamlight Valley is also one of the best early access games that I’ve played – speaking for the PC version, at least. Despite a persistent issue with cloud saving (which I’ve been repeatedly assured is being worked on) the game is largely bug-free on PC, runs smoothly and plays exceptionally well. Were it not for the incomplete story and some impassable doors, you’d hardly realise that the game was in fact still in early access!
So there we go. I’m happy to recommend Disney Dreamlight Valley at this time. Check back when the game leaves early access and I’ll try to share my updated thoughts!
Disney Dreamlight Valley is out now – in early access – for PC, Mac, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. Disney Dreamlight Valley is the copyright of Gameloft and the Walt Disney Company. Some screenshots used above are courtesy of Gameloft. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
I’m a total newbie to the Sniper Elite series, but I found myself swept up in the hype for the latest entry. With Sniper Elite 5 being available on Xbox Game Pass on release day, there was no reason not to give it a shot! The game was even available to pre-load (i.e. to download ahead of its actual launch) which is a time-saver on my slow internet connection. Although this isn’t a review of Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft once again gets high marks from me for their subscription service!
First up, Sniper Elite 5 on PC seems to have a bug related to its anti-cheat software. This bug prevented me from launching the game after it had been installed, but luckily there was a simple workaround: right-click and then choose “run as administrator” in order to make it work. An easy fix, but unfortunately for Sniper Elite 5 it didn’t exactly get off to a spectacular start as a result.
Lining up a shot in Sniper Elite 5.
However, the game itself seems to be well-polished. I didn’t encounter any major bugs and only one visual glitch in the couple of hours that I’ve spent with Sniper Elite 5 so far. Considering that recent years have seen too many games rushed out the door to meet arbitrary release windows, the fact that Sniper Elite 5 at least on PC seems to be in a decent, playable state is good news. It shouldn’t need to be good news, but that’s a reflection of where the video games industry as a whole is right now.
I’d been dimly aware of the Sniper Elite series, but I’d never given it serious consideration until now. I’d seen pictures and clips online from time to time – especially of the franchise’s signature X-ray kill cams – but beyond that I kind of dismissed it. In shooter games I rarely choose to play as a sniper if I have a choice, and stealth missions have never been my favourites in any action or adventure titles. So for those reasons and more, past games in the Sniper Elite franchise just never seemed like “my thing.” I’m not sure what it was that Sniper Elite 5 did with its marketing to change my mind and convince me to give it a shot this time around; perhaps it’s simply the relative lack of big new games as a result of pandemic-enforced delays.
Taking cover.
Regardless, I was curious enough to give Sniper Elite 5 a go, and I’ve been having fun. For some reason I had it in my head that this would be a first-person game; perhaps the screenshots and clips I’d seen in the past left that impression, as first-person mode is basically required for sniping. But when not using binoculars or the sniper scope, the rest of the game takes place from a third-person perspective. That was unexpected for someone who (clearly) had no idea what they were letting themselves in for! I like the mix that this provides; third-person gameplay for stealth and action combines well with looking down the sniper scope from a first-person perspective.
Gameplay itself is polished, and both major sides of the game – sniping and third-person stealth/action – work well. Sniper Elite 5 has some neat level design with expansive open areas and isolated, hidden spots that are perfect for spying or lining up the perfect shot. So far I’ve only participated in a couple of missions, but I like what I’ve seen.
Whee!
In terms of graphics and visuals, Sniper Elite 5 looks decent. I wouldn’t describe any of it as being stunning or beautiful; for my money there are more visually spectacular titles. The use of a lot of green, khaki, and brown tones is period-accurate for World War II France, but perhaps that kind of colour palette doesn’t lend itself to being described in those terms. Graphically, Sniper Elite 5 could go toe-to-toe with many games of the Xbox One/PlayStation 4 generation, but at least on my PC I didn’t feel it could offer much more than that.
This is a broader point that we should probably talk about in more detail some time, but the lack of availability for the Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5 has meant that many games are still being developed with the previous console generation – and its limitations – in mind. Sniper Elite 5 is playable on hardware that’s almost a decade old at this point, and that’s naturally going to hold it back. Every new console generation brings with it cross-gen titles like this, but the unique difficulties faced by new machines seems to have dragged out this period. By this point in the Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5’s lifecycles, I’d expect to see more titles like Sniper Elite 5 ditching last-gen consoles in favour of new hardware.
Sniper Elite 5 looks okay… but visually it’s nothing to write home about.
Voice acting in Sniper Elite 5 isn’t spectacular. It has a stilted, almost wooden quality that reminds me a little too much of amateur dramatics clubs and drama classes at school! Ten years ago I wouldn’t have found that to be worth remarking on, but a lot of modern titles have put way more effort into their voice acting and scriptwriting. Even games that don’t rely on big-name actors or celebrities to bring their characters to life have still managed to sound pretty great and realistic; I find that the writing and voice acting in Sniper Elite 5 kind of snaps me out of the moment.
The saving grace here is that cut-scenes seem to be relatively few and far between, with long sections of uninterrupted gameplay in between. German characters all speak German (with English subtitles) at least by default, which I will admit is a nice feature and adds something to the realism of the World War II setting.
I’m not wild about the voice acting or scriptwriting.
If you’ve ever played a third-person stealth game, you’ll be familiar with the way gameplay works in Sniper Elite 5. There’s a well-implemented cover system, the player character can conceal himself by ducking down, lying prone, or hiding in bushes or long grass. Enemies have line-of-sight that must be avoided, enemies can become alerted to the player’s presence and raise alarms, and making noise or firing weapons can draw attention. Nothing on this side of the game felt particularly groundbreaking, but all of it felt polished and well-constructed. Even as someone brand-new to the series, playing Sniper Elite 5 felt natural and intuitive, and I didn’t have to scrounge around to figure out the controls or how to interact with the environment.
Sniping works basically the same way it does in any first-person shooter, but with a few added extras that some faster-paced titles overlook. Most sniper rifles (as well as binoculars) have different zoom levels, the player character’s breathing can be controlled to steady the scope, and different body parts on enemy targets – including internal organs – can be targetted to get different results. Each shot feels unique, and I would wager that the game offers a decent amount of replayability; going back and redoing a mission will almost certainly lead to different ways to take down targets.
The view down the sniper scope.
This brings us to one of the Sniper Elite series’ signatures: kill cams, and particularly X-ray kill cams that show the damage inflicted inside of a target’s body. These things are pretty gory – even by the standards of a World War II video game – but they can be turned off in the menu if players aren’t interested in that level of brutality. For me, I’m pretty desensitised to that kind of thing, but I can understand if the raw, visceral nature of these slow-motion sequences is offputting to some folks.
As a technical feat, I think the inclusion of these X-ray cams is quite clever. Not only does the game have to detect where a bullet hit an enemy and whether they’re wounded, killed, etc., but it has to show a ballistic path from the barrel of the gun all the way to the target’s body. Then it has to calculate precisely where in the body the bullet would enter, which internal organs would be damaged, and what that would look like, then render it on screen in slow-motion but without stopping or interrupting the main cycle of gameplay. Regardless of whether it’s “your thing” or not, as a feat of game design I find it to be very impressive!
An example of the game’s X-ray kill cam.
Weapons can be customised in Sniper Elite 5, and this adds an additional dimension to gameplay. The player character can carry several different weapons at a time – as well as grenades, binoculars, health packs, and the like – and each main weapon can be customised and upgraded. Not all upgrades are available from the start, needing to be unlocked as the campaign progresses.
It can be fun in any game to customise a weapon and get it working exactly the way you want it to! Sniper Elite 5 offers a lot of options in this regard, and balancing the trade-offs between a more powerful but slower and louder weapon versus a quick and nimble one with a shorter range and less power is all part of the immersion and the experience. It’s possible to customise the player character’s weapon differently for different targets and different missions, and when combined with a variety of different weapons to choose from, this is another way in which Sniper Elite 5 makes the experience feel different each time. Cosmetic changes to weapons also show up in third-person mode when walking around, and I always appreciate details like that!
Customising a sidearm.
So I think that’s about all I have to say about Sniper Elite 5 at this stage. I may come back for an additional write-up/review once I’ve beaten the main campaign, but I’m not sure about that yet so don’t hold your breath! For now, suffice to say that I’m glad I stepped outside of my usual gaming niches to try something a little different. Stealth and sniping have never been my favourite aspects of action or shooter games, but Sniper Elite 5 manages to implement them in a fun way. Coming from me, that’s a pretty big compliment.
I’m not sure how I’d feel if I paid full price for Sniper Elite 5 on one of the new consoles, especially given that its graphics and visuals are definitely last-gen by today’s standards. But considering I was able to get the game on release day (and even pre-load it) via Xbox Game Pass for PC, I honestly can’t complain.
So watch out, Nazis! Sniper Dennis is coming to town!
Sniper Elite 5 is out now for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X. Sniper Elite 5 is also available on PC and Xbox platforms via the Xbox Game Pass subscription service. Sniper Elite 5 was developed, published by, and is the copyright of Rebellion Developments. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Well that certainly came out of nowhere! Microsoft has opened its wallet once again, this time buying up massive video games publisher Activision Blizzard for a whopping $69 billion. Nice.
After receiving criticism during the previous console generation for the lack of exclusive games on its Xbox One system, Microsoft has stepped up in a big way in the last few years. Early moves brought on board companies like Obsidian and Rare, and then last year came another shock announcement: the acquisition of ZeniMax – the parent company of Bethesda. All of those laid the groundwork for something big, and Microsoft has now added Activision Blizzard to its lineup, bringing on board hugely popular games and franchises like Call of Duty, Overwatch, World of Warcraft, and even popular mobile game Candy Crush.
Microsoft will soon own Candy Crush!
At almost ten times the price of its Bethesda purchase, Microsoft clearly has big plans for Activision Blizzard and its games. Even by the standards of other corporate takeovers, $69 billion is a lot of money – an almost unfathomable amount. As Microsoft looks to expand its Xbox and PC gaming platforms, though, it makes a lot of sense to bring on board a company like Activision Blizzard.
Keep in mind that Microsoft is currently pushing hard to take gaming as a whole in a new direction, pioneering a subscription model based on the likes of Netflix – indeed, Game Pass was originally pitched as the video game equivalent of Netflix. Though on the surface the company seems to be taking a two-pronged approach, with its Xbox home console family and PC gaming being separate, in many ways that isn’t really the case any more. Microsoft’s goal is to bring these two platforms as close together as possible, offering most games to players regardless of their chosen platform. One need only look to two of the biggest releases of the past year as an example: both Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 came to both Xbox and PC, despite originally being franchises that were exclusive to consoles.
Forza Horizon 5 was a massive title for both Xbox and PC – and came to Game Pass on release day.
Let’s step back for a moment. My initial reaction to this news was disbelief! But after double-checking my sources and confirming that this was, in fact, not some kind of elaborate prank, my next thoughts were of the Activision Blizzard scandal, and how from Microsoft’s point of view this may not have been the best time to announce this acquisition.
There’s no denying that Activision Blizzard is a tainted brand in the eyes of many players, with the severity of the sexual abuse scandal cutting through to make the news in mainstream outlets when it broke last year. Perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, the scandal is part of the reason why Microsoft may have felt that the timing was right – Activision Blizzard shares had lost basically a third of their value over the last few months (down from almost $100 per share to below $65 prior to the acquisition announcement). Microsoft arguably made a savvy deal in some respects.
Activision Blizzard is a company embroiled in scandal right now.
There also seems to be a sense from at least some quarters of the gaming press and gaming community that Microsoft is “swooping in” to save Activision Blizzard from the scandal, perhaps even preserving the jobs of some employees or protecting games and franchises from cancellation. I didn’t really expect this reaction, and while it’s safe to say there’s been plenty of criticism to balance out some of the positivity, overall the mood of players seems to be more in favour of this acquisition than opposed to it.
We should talk about exclusivity before we go any further. Despite the hopeful – almost desperate – claims being made in some quarters, Microsoft isn’t going to publish Activision Blizzard titles on PlayStation forever. Once the deal has gone through and existing contracts have been fulfilled, expect to see all of Activision Blizzard’s new titles and big franchises become Xbox, PC, and Game Pass exclusives.
Starfield is a highly-anticipated Bethesda title – and it will be an Xbox and PC exclusive following Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda.
This is exactly what happened with Bethesda. Some players clung to the argument that Microsoft somehow wouldn’t want to limit the sales of some of these games to Xbox and PC players only, with some even going so far as to claim that we were witnessing the “death of console exclusives.” That hasn’t happened (to put it mildly) and we’re now expecting massive games like Starfield to become Xbox, PC, and Game Pass exclusives.
When Microsoft first jumped into the home console market in 2001 with the original Xbox, a lot of games industry critics and commentators argued that the company would open its wallet and spend, spend, spend in order to compete with the likes of Sega, Nintendo, and Sony. Microsoft certainly made some sound investments in games early on, but it’s really taken almost twenty years for some of those concerns to be borne out – and by now, the gaming landscape has so thoroughly shifted that it doesn’t feel like a bad thing any more.
It’s been more than two decades since Microsoft jumped into the home console market.
When Microsoft announced the acquisitions of the likes of Oblivion, Rare, and even Bethesda, there was still a sense that the games industry was pursuing its longstanding business model: develop games, release them, sell them, turn a profit, repeat. But now I believe we’re actually in the midst of a major realignment in the way the entire games industry operates – a realignment that’s shaping up to be as disruptive as Netflix’s emergence as a streaming powerhouse in the early 2010s.
Microsoft isn’t making all of these big purchases just to make games and sell them individually. That approach will remain for the foreseeable future, of course, but it isn’t the company’s primary objective. In my view, this is all about Game Pass – Microsoft’s subscription service. Microsoft has seen how successful the subscription model has been for the likes of Netflix – but more importantly for the likes of Disney with Disney+.
Disney+ is both an inspiration and a warning for Microsoft and Game Pass.
As streaming has become bigger and bigger in the film and television sphere, more companies have tried to set up their own competing platforms. In doing so, they pulled their titles from Netflix – something we saw very recently with Star Trek: Discovery, for example, which will now be exclusively available on Paramount+. Microsoft is not content to simply license titles from other companies – like Activision Blizzard – because they fear that a day is coming soon when other companies try to become direct competitors with their own platforms – muscling in on what Microsoft sees as its turf. If Sony gets its act together and finally manages to launch a Game Pass competitor on its PlayStation consoles, Microsoft will be in an out-and-out scrap, and pre-empting that fight is what acquisitions like this one are all about.
If Netflix had had the foresight to use a portion of the money it had been making in the early 2010s to buy up film studios or television production companies, it would have lost far fewer titles over the last few years, and wouldn’t have needed to pivot so heavily into creating its own content from scratch. I think that the Activision Blizzard deal is one way for Microsoft to shore up its own subscription service ahead of a potential repeat of the “streaming wars” in the video game realm.
The official announcement image.
So it isn’t just about “more games for Game Pass” – this deal is about Microsoft’s vision for the future of gaming as a medium, and also their concerns about other companies trying to elbow their way in and become serious competitors. Spending $69 billion may be a huge financial hit up front, but if it pays off it will mean that Game Pass will remain competitive and profitable for years – or even decades – to come. That’s the attitude that I see through this move.
And I don’t believe for a moment that Microsoft is done. Activision Blizzard may be the company’s biggest acquisition to date, but it won’t be the last. When the deal is done and has officially gone through – something that most likely won’t happen for at least twelve months – expect to see Microsoft lining up its next big purchase, and it could be yet another games industry heavyweight. There have been rumours in the past that Microsoft had considered making a move for Electronic Arts, for example… so watch this space!
Could another big purchase be on the cards in the next couple of years?
As a player, these are exciting times – but also turbulent times. I increasingly feel that it’s hardly worth purchasing brand-new games, because several massive titles that I’ve spent money on have ended up coming to Game Pass. In the last few days the Hitman trilogy has arrived on the platform, Doom Eternal landed on Game Pass last year, and even Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is now on the platform less than a year after its release. What’s the point in buying any new games any more? Let’s just wait and it seems Microsoft will eventually bring them to Game Pass!
This is, of course, an attitude Microsoft wants to foster. If Game Pass is an appealing prospect, players will stop buying games. Once they’re “locked in” to the Game Pass ecosystem, Microsoft thinks it’s got them for the long haul. This is how Netflix, Disney+, and other streaming platforms view their audiences, too: once someone has been hooked in, they tend to stay hooked in. That’s why they put the majority of their time and energy into recruiting new subscribers rather than ensuring current subscribers stay signed up.
This is all about Game Pass.
So it’s an interesting moment in gaming, and one that has the potential to herald an entirely new chapter in the medium’s history. People who decry the death of buying individual titles increasingly feel like they’re on the losing side; relics of an era that’s rapidly drawing to a close. Subscriptions have basically become the norm in film and television, with sales of DVDs, Blu-rays, and the like in what seems to be terminal decline. Television viewership, along with cable and satellite subscriptions, are likewise declining.
And who really feels that the death of broadcast television is something to mourn? Subscription platforms offered viewers a better deal – so they snapped it up. If Game Pass can do the same for gaming, more and more players will jump on board.
The Call of Duty series will soon join Game Pass.
Speaking for myself, I’ve been a subscriber to the PC version of Game Pass for almost a year-and-a-half. In that time, my subscription has cost me £8 per month ($10 in the US, I think). Call it eighteen months, and that’s £144 – or roughly the same amount of money as three brand-new full-price video games. In that time I’ve played more than three games, meaning Game Pass feels like a pretty good deal. If Microsoft continues to splash its cash on the likes of Activision Blizzard, bringing even more titles to the platform without asking me to pay substantially more for my subscription, then as a consumer I gotta say it’s worth it.
One corporate acquisition on its own does not irreversibly shift the gaming landscape. But we’re on a trajectory now that I believe will see gaming move away from the old way of doing business into a new era where subscriptions will be a dominant force. There will be advantages and disadvantages to this, but I don’t see it slowing down. As the likes of Sony and even Nintendo try to compete with Game Pass, if anything we’re likely to see this trend speed up.
Watch this space – because this certainly won’t be Microsoft’s last big move.
All titles mentioned above are the copyright of their respective studio, developer, and/or publisher. Some promotional screenshots courtesy of IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Forza Horizon 5 was released in November for Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, and PC. It took a little while, but after spending quite a bit of time with the game over the past few weeks I’m finally ready to put pen to paper and share my thoughts!
Forza Horizon 5 is a big game. There are different kinds of races and events to participate in, ranging from multi-race championships all the way to smaller challenges and mini-events. The game’s open world is huge and offers varied terrains and scenery. And perhaps most importantly for a racing game, Forza Horizon 5 offers a veritable smorgasbord of cars to choose from.
What Forza Horizon 5 is not, though, is massively different from its predecessor. If you’ve played Forza Horizon 4 at all, you know the formula. This time around there’s more: the game world is bigger, there are more roads to drive on, more races and events to take part in, and so on. But it isn’t a fundamentally different experience – aside from the scenery changing from the quaint English countryside to the deserts, jungles, and beaches of Mexico, it’s basically an iterative instalment of the series. I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem for Forza Horizon 5; it’s a riff on the same concept, expanding it in some significant areas but without really breaking new ground. However, when the formula works, why shake it up too much? As the saying goes: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
The Horizon spin-off series has always taken a more casual approach than mainline games in the Forza Motorsport series, and that trend continues here. There’s a party atmosphere that runs through the entire game, with a handful of named characters who all take a very laid-back approach to running the titular Horizon festival. That feeling extends to gameplay, too. Races are organised seemingly haphazardly, and there’s a lot of fun to be had simply by exploring the open world, making your own fun, and driving some fancy cars at high speed!
Forza Horizon 5 is perhaps the most accessible racing game I’ve played – except, maybe, for Mario Kart 8. The game is geared up for fans of arcade racing, with a “pick-up-and-play” attitude that feels perfectly aligned with the aforementioned casual, laid-back approach taken by characters within the game itself. That isn’t to say that Forza Horizon 5 presents no challenge – not at all. But this is a game that allows players to tailor the kind of challenge or fun that they want to the way that they like to play. There are options to tweak practically every aspect of single-player gameplay, meaning Forza Horizon 5 would be a great introduction to racing games for a complete newbie – but a game that experienced racing fans can enjoy as well.
As a gamer with disabilities, I always appreciate games that go out of their way to be accommodating. In Forza Horizon 5, it’s possible to slow down single-player gameplay to give players more time to react or make moves. It’s possible to see a guide line on the ground or along racetracks pointing players in the right direction. And there are different levels of assistance; cars can be set up to brake automatically, for example, as well as change gears. Forza Horizon 5 also recommends specific cars for specific races, ensuring that players who aren’t familiar with cars or racing games won’t find themselves in an unwinnable situation.
None of these things have to be used, and they can all be turned off for players who want a more realistic or challenging racing experience. The game has pre-set difficulty options, but within those pre-sets it’s possible to tweak many different individual characteristics so players can get the kind of experience that they want. This really does open up the game to many different skill levels, and Forza Horizon 5 would be a great game for someone brand-new, a kid seeking a more realistic racer than the likes of Mario Kart, and everyone else all the way up to racing simulation fanatics.
Forza Horizon 5 also brings a lot of customisation options to the table. Every car (at least, every car that I’ve unlocked so far) can be customised. Cars can be repainted in every colour of the rainbow, and can have custom liveries applied – including advertising logos for famous brands. There’s already a bustling customisation scene, with players from all over the world sharing their custom creations for others to download and use in-game. I love a game with strong customisation elements, and Forza Horizon 5 absolutely delivers in that regard!
As I was getting started with Forza Horizon 5, I actually found myself getting a little emotional. As you may know, I’m non-binary – meaning that my gender identity falls in between male and female, and I prefer to use they/them pronouns. When setting up my Forza Horizon 5 character, the option to use they/them was present alongside male and female pronouns – something that was amazing for me, and for other non-binary players as well I hope. It’s still quite rare to see games offer this option, so it was an incredibly welcome surprise.
I’m not the world’s biggest car enthusiast. My knowledge of cars mostly comes courtesy of Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of the crew of Top Gear! But for people who know more about cars than I do, I reckon Forza Horizon 5 has a lot to offer. Although the game goes out of its way to be accessible and to have cars ready-to-race from the moment of being unlocked or purchased, there are still plenty of tuning options to fiddle about with. At the game’s uppermost echelons, where elite players are duking it out and races are won or lost by the millisecond, perhaps some of these things will make a difference. I’m not at that level – but some folks are, and there are tuning and customisation guides already for many of the game’s vehicles.
Although Forza Horizon 5 includes a lot of ultra-expensive supercars from manufacturers like Bugatti, Koenigsegg, and Lamborghini, I think it’s great that the game offers classic cars, “normal” street cars, and even some novelty vehicles or cult favourites as well. For example, the game includes a classic Land Rover (a personal favourite of mine), as well as every nerd’s favourite car: the DeLorean! There’s a VW Camper available, a classic Mini, a Morris Minor, as well as a Hummer, and even a car taken straight from Hot Wheels! In short, there’s fun to be had with some of these vehicles, and while some may not be suitable for winning every race or clocking the fastest time, for having fun driving around the game’s open world I think some of these additions are absolutely fantastic!
Some racing games offer light-hearted fun, and for me, Forza Horizon 5 is absolutely that kind of game. I can pick it up for even just a few minutes at a time, hop into a race or two, and then put it down knowing I can do the same thing again later on. It absolutely can be more than that; players with the inclination can take it more seriously, spend more time on their vehicles, and really push hard to get the best lap times and reach the top of the various leaderboards. That’s not the way I personally play – but the fact that Forza Horizon 5 has plenty to offer to all kinds of players is a huge mark in its favour in my book!
I’m a subscriber to the PC version of Xbox Game Pass, so for me Forza Horizon 5 was available on release day to download and play at no extra cost. On that basis, I’m thrilled with the game. That being said, for folks who don’t like the idea of a subscription or who like owning games outright, I can absolutely recommend Forza Horizon 5 as a purchase. Game Pass is a great service, but I recognise that it isn’t for everyone. When I looked at Halo Infinite a few weeks ago I said that paying £55 for just the campaign felt a bit much, so getting the game on Game Pass made a lot of sense. But there’s a heck of a lot of value in Forza Horizon 5 for players of varying skill levels and with varying levels of interest in cars – so it feels like a solid buy.
I think that’s all I have to say about this one! I’m thoroughly enjoying my time with Forza Horizon 5 and I’m looking forward to jumping back in and getting into my next race. See you on the track!
Forza Horizon 5 is out now for Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, and PC. Forza Horizon 5 is the copyright of Playground Games, Turn 10 Studios, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Promotional images and artwork courtesy of Xbox and Microsoft. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are minor spoilers ahead for Halo Infinite, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and other iterations of the Halo franchise.
After the longest gap in between games since the franchise began, Halo Infinite was finally released last week. I haven’t yet completed the campaign, but I’ve spent a couple of hours with the game so far – enough time to give you my first impressions and initial thoughts about Halo Infinite.
First up, make sure you choose the right version when you go to download it! I have Game Pass for PC, and on the homepage of the Xbox app there was a big Halo Infinite icon, so I clicked it and it began to download – taking hours on my painfully slow internet connection. When it was done I booted up the game… only to find I couldn’t play the campaign, just the multiplayer! The campaign is a separate download, so I had to wait another few hours for that. Not the best start – and this should really be made clearer on the Xbox app.
Promo art for Halo Infinite.
When I was able to load the campaign, I immediately encountered an issue with the audio. I usually play games with headphones on, but although my headphones were plugged in there was no audio. After some investigating, the only way I could find to fix it came from someone else who’d had a similar problem and shared their solution on a forum – I had to go into my PC’s sound settings and change my headphone settings. Something uncomplicated but stupidly obscure; how this person figured it out I’ve no idea! It worked fine after that – but again, Halo Infinite made a poor first impression as a result.
The game opens with a cut-scene showing the Master Chief being thrown into space by an alien monster – the leader of a villainous faction called the Banished. This villain, and a couple of other Banished leaders who we’re also introduced to in cut-scenes across the game’s opening act, all feel quite generic. The vocal performances were hammy and over-the-top, and I don’t really get the impression that the leaders of the Banished are anything other than “evil for the sake of it” kind of villains. By default this makes the game less compelling and less interesting!
The game opens with Master Chief getting beaten up by this guy.
I haven’t played Halo 5; it wasn’t included as part of The Master Chief Collection when that was released on PC a couple of years ago, and it hasn’t been released as a standalone title. But the pre-release marketing and chatter about Halo Infinite seemed to indicate that the game was some kind of soft renewal of the franchise and would be a good jumping-on point for players unfamiliar with the world and lore of the Halo series – a series which, lest we forget, has recently passed its twentieth anniversary. Based on my first couple of hours with the game, I have to disagree with that.
Halo Infinite feels like an unapologetic sequel. We don’t find out why the Master Chief happened to be aboard that starship, and pretty quickly as he retrieves not-Cortana from a nearby Halo ring the game seems to reference events that took place in Halo 5 – something about Cortana going rogue and needing to be deleted. At this point I feel pretty lost with the story, with Master Chief blindly shooting his way through waves of enemies without any readily apparent goal or purpose.
I didn’t play Halo 5 so I feel a bit lost with the story.
I took a decade off from the Halo games after Reach, and it was only when I got The Master Chief Collection on PC that I played the fourth game in the series and the ODST spin-off. So I’m not the world’s biggest Halo fan by any stretch, and maybe big fans of the franchise are having a whale of a time – if so, that’s fantastic. I don’t want to detract from anyone’s enjoyment by being an old sourpuss! But Halo Infinite’s story appears to rely heavily on what came before, so for new fans or for folks who’ve been out of the loop, maybe The Master Chief Collection would be a better way to get started.
I found a couple of very odd graphical bugs during my relatively short time with the game, too. During the second mission, when Master Chief has arrived at the Halo installation, doorways appeared to glitch out: they’d appear to be solid even after “opening” and it was possible to just clip through what looked like a solid, graphically buggy door. Then shortly after, every alien of a particular kind (I think the Elites) were also completely bugged, and they ended up looking all stretched out and just broken. It’s hard to put into words, so see the screenshots below (click or tap the images for a larger version):
The glitchy doorway.Those diagonal things in the background are supposed to be Banished Elites.A closer look at the glitchy Elite.
All of this kind of added up to mean that the game left a weaker-than-expected first impression. I’d been excited for Halo Infinite; the prospect of a franchise I remember with fondness from the days of the original Xbox getting a soft renewal and a new coat of paint was something I found genuinely appealing. I want to like Halo Infinite – but the somewhat dense backstory, a villain who feels silly at best, and a handful of bugs and glitches that should really have been fixed before launch have definitely got in the way of that.
So that’s the bad stuff out of the way. But my experience with Halo Infinite so far hasn’t been entirely negative by any stretch. There is definitely a good game at its core, one with some truly exciting and fun sci-fi shooting. The guns that I’ve used so far have been varied, ranging from standard rifles and pistols to Halo staples like the Needler. Halo Infinite’s gunplay is fluid, the environments so far have been well-designed, and were it not for those few bugs and issues that I’ve encountered I’d be giving it a ten out of ten for its gameplay.
Halo Infinite has great gunplay.
As a multiplayer player-versus-player online shooter, which is what many folks come to Halo for, I think that bodes well. I can absolutely see it being a game that keeps players hooked well into 2022 and perhaps even beyond that, as there seem to be teases of a lot more multiplayer content to come. And that’s great… for people who like that kind of game. As someone who came to Halo Infinite for its campaign, I feel underwhelmed more than anything else. Halo Infinite’s campaign isn’t exactly bad, it just isn’t as good or well-written as I’d hoped it would be.
So far, in addition to the Master Chief I’ve met two major characters: a pilot and not-Cortana – an AI named “the Weapon.” Both characters seem interesting, and I’m definitely curious to see how their stories progress as the game goes on. The voice and motion-capture performances for both characters have been great so far, with some of the Weapon’s facial expressions in particular being extraordinarily well-animated. The Halo games have come a long way from their 2001 origins in that respect. Were it not for those graphical bugs I encountered, I’d say Halo Infinite makes the franchise look better than ever.
Not-Cortana… a.k.a. the Weapon.
So I guess I need to read a synopsis of Halo 5 or something… get myself caught up with all of the story that I missed (and all the other story that I’ve forgotten about!) Maybe then I’ll have a better time as I progress through the campaign. Halo Infinite has potential, but I guess what I’d say is that I’m glad I picked it up as part of Game Pass; I’d feel far less charitable about its flaws and shortcomings had I paid £55 for it.
If you’re only interested in multiplayer, I think Halo Infinite will be a fine shooter going through 2022. Of this year’s big first-person shooter releases, there’s surely no question that Halo Infinite is the best choice by far. Battlefield 2042 and Call of Duty: Vanguard can’t compete, not by a long-shot. If you’re interested in the campaign, though, I think Halo Infinite isn’t as much of a soft reboot or fresh start as I was expecting – so make sure you’re caught up on what happened in previous games before you jump in.
Promo screenshot.
The bugs are disappointing, but so far they haven’t been so overwhelming that I felt the need to quit the game. Hopefully these issues can be patched out in the days ahead. There don’t seem to be as many reports of similar issues affecting the Xbox One or Xbox Series S/X version of the game, which is positive news for those of you using those platforms.
So that’s it, I guess. An unspectacular start, but not a terrible one. Halo Infinite could certainly do a lot worse, and in a first-person shooter market that increasingly only caters to the multiplayer crowd, it’s nice to see that Microsoft and Xbox are sticking with single-player campaigns. It’s also great that Halo Infinite got a simultaneous release on PC, and a day-one launch on Game Pass. Microsoft has become quite a player-friendly company in that regard, and I have to respect that.
If you already have Game Pass, it’s hard not to recommend Halo Infinite – you might as well give it a shot, at least. And its multiplayer mode is currently free-to-play for everyone, Game Pass subscriber or not. For £55/$60 though, the campaign alone might not be worth it. You’re probably better off signing up for Game Pass just for a month, beating the campaign, and then cancelling your subscription!
Halo Infinite is out now for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X. Halo Infinite is also available via Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass for PC. The Halo series – including Halo Infinite – is the copyright of 343 Industries, Xbox Game Studios, and Microsoft. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 