 So I'd planned to do a Starfield video well over a week ago, but then something happened. The game kept going. It wasn't until about 50 hours in that I finally decided to look at how far along in the main quest I was and discovered I was like less than halfway through the game. At that point I broke down and did something I never do. I read some reviews about a game I had planned to write about. Most of those reviews were positive, but there was a good quarter of them that panned the game for reasons I think are kind of insane. The negative and mixed reviews both from major publications But also read it in YouTube almost all seem to argue that the big new Bethesda game was bad because it was a big new Bethesda game So today let's talk about why Starfield is very possibly the best game Bethesda has ever made and seem to figure out a Why I like BGS games even as I have a general dislike for open-world stuff and B why so many people keep expecting BGS games to be something they've never been Starfield after the logo What were you expecting? At least since oblivion there's been a vocal minority of people who've wanted BGS games to be something other than what they are Bethesda games are RPGs, but they're very specific kinds of RPGs They're Bethesda RPGs No other studio makes games like Bethesda and it's perfectly understandable if their games aren't to the taste of certain players But before we get to addressing the complaints I have seen from critics and players who don't like the game Let's go over what BGS games are now The first modern Bethesda game is oblivion, but even the earlier ones were almost always very different from other big CRPG's From the start BGS focused on scale and complex systems where other RPGs were focused on narrative and role-playing Arenas had the absurd procedurally generated scale and its spell system was a systems heavy approach to combat Daggerfall created a ridiculous map for players to wander Morrowind took the scale idea and melded it to more conventional CRPG story structure and Oblivion was the start of the modern BGS game as we know it the physics objects that can be manipulated The large map with tons of points of interest that are given flavor through environmental storytelling and text logs all that stuff There's a clear line from oblivion right to Starfield Things have changed, but the core of what makes the game compelling is the same a ton of physics objects an Endless stream of distractions a ton of self-contained small stories of varying quality and Multiple progression systems operating in tandem that are always right on the edge of breaking down from the sheer complexity of the interactions BGS games were never bioware games The complexity was never in the role-playing or the narrative branching. It was in the progression and the simulations BGS games have always been a weird mixture of open-world RPG and immersive sim and action game It's this breadth of systems that makes a game like Fallout 4 with only a handful of decent quests Still a great game Because the dungeons locations physics and progression systems are so compelling Many of the mixed reviews I saw were intent on comparing this game to Baldur's Gate 3 But that's a terrible comparison. They are totally different games trying to do totally different things Both games are excellent, but they're excellent for very different reasons What it does well Starfield's greatest success is the same thing that makes all recent BGS games work so well BGS games are amazing at never giving you a reason to quit The game like Fallout 4 and Skyrim and Fallout 3 is Amazingly paced so you're almost always working towards some small attainable goal and because there are so many systems There's always something else to work towards when you get bored This is only possible because of the sheer breadth of stuff in the game Starfield has an almost absurd amount of high-quality side quests It has a ton of main quests Faction quests a huge amount of small little activity side quests It has quest lines for at least four different companions then it has ship building which I engaged with quite a bit It has its regular progression system It has space power to track down like the Dragon Shouts in Skyrim It has an extremely deep crafting system for your space suit your weapons Drugs outposts it has the planet scanning which is strangely addictive because it's exactly the right length of time to accomplish When you add all of these things on top of each other you find yourself switching between objectives every 20 minutes or so and most Importantly, you're constantly able to do multiple things at once on your way to a main quest You stop at a side quest location while you're there you mine some stuff You need it for research then while you're mining you figure you may as well scan some animals because some of them might drop Adhesive and you need adhesive for a weapon mind you want to make that's the magic of a Bethesda game People have always talked about how Bethesda games are at their best when you just wander off But that's not a really accurate way to describe it Wandering off is only interesting because you're certain to find stuff you need and you're certain to accomplish other goals along the way This only works so well because there are so many goals in these games Wandering off is as good a way to accomplish things as any other method I fully expected Starfield to be good from the beginning I had every confidence that this would be a good game despite all the shit Fallout 4 has gotten in the time since its release I think it's a fantastic game with a bad story But I don't play BGS games for their stories. Nobody should do that. None of them have good stories So why would we expect that still I think as far as BGS games go Starfield's story is about as good as you can Reasonably expect so let's talk about that for a bit narrative Fallout 3 and Skyrim did not have great main stories But they still have narratives that work and that's because the games are both loaded with a ton of fun self-contained side quests almost every BGS game has this same kind of structure going on None of the quests are super deep and they very rarely interact with one another like quests do in something like Baldur's Gate In fact BGS quests often feel like they sprung from huge brainstorming sessions You can imagine a room of people in a whiteboard with a huge list of interesting premises What if there was a house with a family that had elections? What if two people acted out a comic book? What if there was a murder mystery with robots? What if the player finds a serial killer who's killing Raiders in most BGS games the narrative quality varies quite a bit in these Quests, but the locations are usually great and they serve to push you through the games world and most importantly They rigidly adhere to the BGS pacing You should be constantly moving and finding fun new things that last for about 15 minutes After finishing Starfield, I think it's fair to say that this is the best group of side quests They've ever had in one of their games There's just an unbelievable amount of them the locations in Starfield are pretty Uniformly excellent the voice acting is probably the best it has ever been in one of their games with the most of it being at Least competent and much of it being really quite excellent and the actual ideas explored run a really wide gamut There is the usual goofy scenarios But also a legitimately large amount of really compelling stuff with interesting choices to make now again This isn't mass effect or Baldur's Gate Most of the choices you make in these self-contained stories do not have any effect outside of the quests themselves But it's a credit to the quality of the quests that they still feel Consequential all of the faction quest chains here are excellent Do you see the Freestar and the Ryujin quest chains all take you to interesting areas? They all have compelling choices to make and they do a great job of always adhering to the tone a BGS game should have they're serious without being too serious The main story as is often the case with the BGS game is probably the least interesting narratively But it's still quite good and it's full of memorable levels and reveals when you go to NASA on earth It is a truly excellent narrative reveal The reason this main quest works much better than Fallout 4 or Skyrim is the main quest Isn't an earth-shattering mission with massive time constraints You're not finding your father or son or stopping a huge looming threat to the world You're exploring a mystery which makes doing side quests after side quests feel far more reasonable In fact all of the best quests in the game are once again side quests Another thing to point out here is that the three major cities are all small open-world games all on their own and Outside those three major cities. There are several other large towns one off small areas like Paradiso are Larger than major hub cities in previous games of theirs. The sheer scale of the game is incredible I found it literally stunning how many quests are in those three big cities alone because BGS games have wisely never marked quest givers on the map The player is forced to actually explore the cities You basically wander around and looked for named NPCs almost every named NPC and there are dozens and dozens ties into a quest somehow and a huge number of them are quest givers themselves Of course a lot of them are simple one-step quests But almost all of them are well contextualized and a surprising number of the small quests are quite good My one regret here is that there wasn't more of a conflict between the factions But I have to assume that that's likely to be something they explore in a sequel or a DLC at some point BGS games generally don't present you with many large moral Quadries but Starfield probably does this more than any of their previous games again This is not Baldur's Gate 3 But the choices you make here almost all hinge on interesting moral choices that you make not so much to change the narrative Destination but rather just to give flavor to the world Now I should be clear Bethesda's writers aren't good at making difficult moral choices Most of them are pretty simple if a CEO murders a bunch of people but has apparently created a bunch of jobs That's not a compelling choice and if a war criminal had a neat plan that doesn't mean you should side with him Still they are choices they make you pause for a few seconds and for the people who want to play evil characters You have that option. I've never done that in a game personally So this has always been something I just don't care about But there are some choices they have a moral component even if they're pretty black and white And that's often good enough when taken with all the other things that a BGS game does and with that Let's move on to the meat of a BGS game the systems and mechanics The mean Bethesda games more than pretty much any other open-world games are amazing time wasters We're crossing the map in most open-world games is kind of a boring waste of time and BGS games. It's often the very best part This is partly because the maps are always extremely carefully designed and are full of cool things every few minutes The switch over to a series of small procedural maps interspersed with a random selection of pre-built dungeons was a huge change and one that could easily have been a disaster BGS games were already a very special sauce and messing with the formula was dangerous But after playing Starfield I have a feeling that Bethesda spent years Diling in this core experience and amazingly it still feels just like any of their other games I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out how the game still felt so similar despite such a huge change to exploration and I eventually realized that BGS successfully replicated their random encounter system into its new world and map design Jumping to a new system has a decent chance of triggering a random encounter Landing on a world and traveling to a waypoint still has the same chance of distracting you with other things along the way and the Excellent system from Fallout 4 that made looting so engaging is expanded here Adding the research step to the crafting system means that the reward for checking out most things around a landing site is High enough to be very engaging It's pretty perfectly paced and designed and really shows how good BGS has gotten at balancing a very large amount of systems Each research step requires a bunch of different stuff yet that progression system is almost Amazingly well balanced without much effort at all You'll find yourself knocking out research projects and being able to craft better and better stuff at a really nice and steady clip Occasionally you'll find you need adhesive or one particular component And you'll have to go find that one thing but it's actually pretty rare Which makes it fun to actually hunt down that one mineral or that one component But other than those very rare instances Simply playing the game as you naturally would a Bethesda game and exploring their very well made locations and points of interest will have You progressing consistently towards your goal a few other things combined to make the exploration pretty unchanged First off the sound design in a Bethesda game does a ton of heavy lifting when it comes to exploring The ambient music in Starfield is as good as ever Sound effects are fantastic and just as always BGS is amazing at creating a mood While you're walking across the map the music that plays as you're exploring a dungeon creates the perfect amount of tension They really are one of the best studios in the world at this and have been for a very long time The addition of the boost pack and the differences in gravity between planets also makes simply moving around the world extremely fun I've said many times that moving across a big-ass map is often the most boring thing about an open world game It takes something special to make it bearable The glider in zelda the vast amount of vehicles and far cry The stunning beauty and amazing art design of ghost asushima BGS games have always managed to make this still be fun because of just how good they are at making compelling points of interest And that's true here as well But the boost pack and low gravity of many if not most planets Gives you a great degree of freedom and it just feels awesome when you add in the strangely addictive scanning stuff You've got open world gameplay that's basically perfectly designed to keep you constantly engaged with something You're doing something as you're moving across the planet. You're never just walking and that boost pack makes combat quite enjoyable as well But this is fbs gameplay took a big step forward to the point that I think fallout 4 is a well put together shooter And starfield is an incremental step forward even from there encounters are really well done with excellent encounter design It combines long range and short range encounters and a still pretty satisfying stealth option It's a testament to how far their combat has come that's no longer just good for an rpg It's now a legitimately above average fps laid on top of a classic bgs game starfield's combat also does a really nice job Tying into its leveling system progression is probably best described as fallout 4 Minus stats and plus skyrims level as you do stuff for the most part This new progression system works very well Because you have to make real choices about what you want to max out and having to upgrade perks through gameplay Does a nice job tying those systems together Though there are some annoying quirks in the tasks you need to do to level up some skills Some tasks take way longer than others like installing 15 weapon mods is a hell of a lot longer than killing 50 dudes Or knocking over a hundred guys with a jet pack is a hell of a lot longer than installing four helmet mods One of my only complaints about it is that there are no stats I was actually recently thinking about writing an essay about how stats have now started disappearing from rpgs And starfield kind of just reinforced that first we lost skills in Bethesda games. Now we've lost stats I prefer stats and perks to just perks I understand that bgs has an insatiable thirst for simplifying things and I do totally understand their reasons But I simply prefer having stats to level in a game I'm replaying cyberpunk at the moment and the update in that game shows how you can still have stats in a very accessible rpg Still overall starfield's comment is very good and its progression is quite good Even though I do not like that they've done away with stats. I just don't think that's a healthy direction for an rpg to take What's with the bad reviews Okay, I think that's a fine overview of why I think starfield is a great game But the real reason I wanted to write this was to respond to some of the criticism of the game I saw on youtube read it and especially from some big review outlets Most of that criticism is of the same few things So allow me to respond to the most common critiques of the game Let's start with a common one that I cannot possibly disagree with more Most of the mixed and negative youtube reviews seem to be strangely focused on the creation engine This was a common critique all the way back in fallout 4 I distinctly remember watching the angry joe review right after the game came out and him focusing really heavily on graphics in the engine And now as then I just honestly couldn't possibly give less shits about that Starfield looks great It looks significantly better than any of their previous games The textures are really good and the character models are more than good enough I played pitfall as a kid, dude This is amazing to me almost every modern game looks more than good enough to me And more importantly starfield's art design is as great as ever Weapon models are fantastic Armor is beautiful the entire aesthetic of the game Effectively builds a world that feels real And that's all that matters to me in a game when it comes to its art and graphics Just make it feel real to me But the more important response to this is that the bgs engine may not be the best looking one in the world But it looks more than good enough for what the game needs to do It needs to be able to handle a bunch of progression systems a huge crafting and upgrade system an fps game a bunch of physics objects A dialogue system a quest system a procedural quest system And it has to allow for massive simple modding bgs switching engines to one that modders don't know would be a total catastrophe I don't know anything about engines other than what the final product is And bgs continues to use this engine to make really good games that are like nothing else anyone in the industry makes I will defer to them on this The writing isn't as good as balder's gate 3 Another very common complaint, especially on reddit that balder's gate 3 Shows how to make quests that have real choices and consequences and the lack of that in starfield Shows that they're lazy This is literally an insane critique Yes, indeed balder's gate 3 is truly amazing with the really intense interplay between quests and your choices It's clear they put Countless hours into that part of the game But you know what they put zero hours into over at larion the fps combat Or being able to mod a shotgun 15 different ways or making a 3d model with physics for every single object in the game They didn't do that because larion was making a narrative focused game Bethesda was making a systems focused game with a narrative If you are asking for bgs to make quests and narratives like balder's gate You're asking for an entirely different game that kind of stuff requires a ton of effort man Every quest needs to be blocked out. Every single permutation needs to be tested If you want that in a bgs game, you're gonna lose what these games are Why do I want that again balder's gate 3 exists and it's great starfield exists and is great Complaining that there aren't intricately woven narrative choices in starfield is like complaining about the lack of wall running in gears of war There is no wall running in gears of war because gears of war isn't about wall running Just like there's no cover mechanic in doom eternal because doom eternal isn't a cover shooter all the loading screens Here's one I can almost understand but is still ultimately a silly complaint Starfield has a lot of loading screens I played on pc and the loading screens were extremely short and not really at all intrusive But they do exist like they always have But so what it's obvious the loading screens exist because of the number of systems and objects in each area If each cave wasn't instanced the game would need to load a billion physics objects every time you land in on a planet The cities would already kind of struggle with performance We're run at 4 p.m Because the game will be tracking 4 000 sandwiches in the area the game has loading screens when you're entering an instanced place I honest to god Dastly prefer this to having to watch my character squeeze through a gap in the wall or watch an opening the door cut scene I don't need the loading screens cleverly hidden Just put the loading screen up as long as they're not egregiously long. I'm good It's possible they're bad on console. I guess but I don't play these games on console Seems like a very strange complaint to me. It's the same as it's always been Actually, it's a little less than it's always been so there's been improvement You can't fly straight from the planets to space and you can't roam across the planets forever Who gives a shit? Why would I want to fly from the planet to space? And why does it matter if I can't walk or fly across the whole planet? I think people had extremely strange expectations for starfield when it's literally skyrim in space The starbone powers are basically dragon shouts for god's sake walking forever across the planet sounds horrendous to me The bgs games again are made for a huge mass market They are rpgs for the call of duty crowd and they're wonderful at being just that The game has always been about having something interesting every few minutes Not about being able to wander a big empty planet or being a hyper realistic space sim The game is already loaded with systems and stuff to mess around with At some point a developer needs to make a decision about what is critical to the game they're making and what would be nice But not needed wandering entire planets on foot or ship would be nice for the people who wouldn't find that boring as hell But it's clearly not needed flying straight from the ground to space would maybe be nicer than a loading screen For some people, but it would be worse for me I would honestly vastly prefer to just have the loading screen get me where I want to go This seems like such a weird ass nitpick that it's kind of absurd starfield is a Bethesda game It is very possibly in my opinion the best Bethesda game ever made being able to walk across an entire planet Wouldn't have made the game any better or worse And it is a feature that a tiny insignificant group of people would use The explorable areas on each planet are plenty huge man Thousands of meters in each direction and you can land anywhere on any planet that has a surface What more could one possibly want? The one legit critique I had with this game is that there's no fucking map of the cities This is kind of awful because the cities are gigantic this time finding the bookshop in a killer or a specific apartment building in Jemisin Is a bit frustrating and the game could easily have used a simple map of only the major settlements The only reason for not having it that I can think of is there would be no way to make maps of the procedural planets And it will be odd to only have maps of the major cities, but that actually makes perfect sense to me It seems totally normal that I'd have a map on my phone of major cities But not if a random planet with a few caves But other than that lack of a map the fact that it's grotesque the game launched without dlss And the generally mediocre performance I have almost no complaints about the game I was able to run it at ultra 4k and still get 50 to 60 fps Now that's not some big accomplishment and if the game had dlss 3 I'd have been running at 90 fps But you know Bethesda likes money more than it likes his players obviously I guess Wrapping up So here's the deal with starfield It's a great game unless you approach it cynically every issue people have with this game Can be boiled down to wanting a bgs game to be something they have never been Starfield does what every good bgs game does It keeps you playing for dozens and dozens of hours without any one thing about it being amazing Instead it's just consistently above average at almost everything it does The genius of their games is the ability to be incredibly wide without being too deep or complex for the average player There's nothing that starfield does that some other studio doesn't do better Its fps combat is surpassed by many other studios its rpg narrative isn't nearly as good as balder's gates 3 Its space sim stuff isn't as good as several dedicated space sims its crafting and progression have been done better elsewhere But no other studio is able to take all of those things and do them at a level of competence like Bethesda does No other studio is able to make games that don't have any friction quitting points Starfield will never bore you or piss you off to the point that you just stop playing Its exploration like all bgs games is almost scientifically engineered Each area of interest is exactly far enough away from the others to feel like exploring without feeling like wandering a big-ass empty map Its quests are perfectly paced so that as soon as you're bored with one it ends It has a huge variety of quests that are all at least Interesting with even fetch quests generally sending you somewhere cool Its combat is as good as you will find in a first-person rpg Most rpgs have downright terrible combat. I love outer worlds more than most people seem to but its combat isn't even in the same Universe as starfields It's rare that starfield has moments that makes you feel like you're playing an all-time classic But it's just as rare that it feels anything other than really good Making a game with so many systems So many quests So many voice lines and so much high quality stuff that you can simply stumble on is so insanely rare It deserves tremendous praise Nothing about starfield is a nine out of ten system But the game is almost the definition of better than the sum of its parts It's 27 or 8 out of 10 systems so many that they cumulatively become a nine of 10 game It's the rare game where width is more important than depth Most importantly it retains the strange magic that bgs games have always had Then that magic is so unique. It's hard to put your finger on exactly why it works so well I guess all you can really say about starfield is It just works Thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye