Bethesda recently announced a major update for Starfield that will be released later this month, featuring UI overhauls, expanded difficulty customization, and improved planet maps. As wonderful as these features look, do they really address the issues that sank Starfield from one of the most anticipated Microsoft debuts of all time, to the largely criticised work it is today?
A quick look at Microsoft’s “Most played games” statistics at the time of writing reveals that Destiny 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Bethesda’s own Skyrim Special Edition all have higher concurrent player counts than Starfield. Even Halo: Infinite – which had its own rocky start – comes out higher.
Starfield is still the 41st game on the chart, but it’s clear that a significant amount of players have dropped it for other games (including some of Bethesda’s older work).
I, quite genuinely, really enjoyed Starfield. I preordered the Premium Edition, unlocked every achievement, and sunk several hundred hours into the game as soon as I could. Despite this, I haven’t sat down and played the game in a very long time, simply because I ran out of content worth exploring.
As someone who loved Starfield, is the upcoming May update enticing enough to bring me back as a daily player? Probably not. Here’s my take:
Patches, so Far
Up to this point, Bethesda’s primary focus for patches has been bug fixes. While, in theory, this is great and is certainly better than nothing, this led to an unintended fatigue that I’m sure was felt by more than myself.
Playing on Xbox, I didn’t experience many game-breaking bugs. The extent of my problems were the occasional visual abnormality, and many, many miscellaneous quest markers that refused to complete, but nothing that had any real effect on the gameplay.
I booted up the game to see if five months of updates had resolved the issues I experienced, and unfortunately, they did not. I even encountered new visual oddities to make things worse (and more humorous, as my character now turns into a floating head after unequipping a spacesuit).
While I have no doubt the team at Bethesda is working hard on addressing the reported issues that are determined to be the most game-breaking or high severity, it means that those of us who didn’t stop playing the game because of minor bugs haven’t received changes that target us specifically. This wouldn’t be a big deal if there wasn’t a problem that ran much deeper through the game.
The Bigger Problem
I believe Starfield is built on a very strong foundation. I’m a huge fan of the work Bethesda puts into games and the world they’ve managed to create here, but there are two components to the game’s major flaw: repetition.
1. Random Isn’t That Random
Starfield was heavily marketed as being the biggest game Bethesda has ever made. I believe that’s true, but it’s how they achieved this that’s important.
If you play the game for as long as I have, you begin to notice that the abandoned facilities and random encounters are extremely repetitive. There’s a couple of potential factions the NPCs will be representing, but the locations are entirely copy-paste. So much so, that I found muscle memory doing more work than it should. I knew exactly where enemy spawn points were, where the loot would be found, and what rooms were worth exploring.
This zombified the gaming experience. This content is engaging in the beginning, but once you’ve encountered it over and over, it loses its charm. The trademark Bethesda magic becomes lost as hand-crafted content is traded for monotonous duplicates. All for the sake of building a massive world that doesn’t have enough unique content to make it feel alive.
2. NG+ Reveals Shallowness
Once you reach the end of the main storyline, you have the option to enter NG+, which lets you begin the game again with the same character and adds an interesting new perspective to your playthrough.
Overall, I really enjoy this feature. I’m one of the maniacs who has gone through NG+ over ten times, so I have a decent understanding of what happens depending on the choices you make throughout the game. Unfortunately, to Starfield’s own detriment, NG+ doesn’t reveal difference or consequence in your decisions, it actually reveals the opposite.
NG+ lets you pull back the curtain, in a way, and see that the choices you make in many of the game’s side quests and faction storylines will have you ending up at the exact same spot regardless of what you do. This dilutes the impact of the many dialogue options, and uncovers the fact that some of the seemingly dynamic choices in the game are really quite linear.
NG+ is fun, but after a few rides, you begin to notice how great some aspects of the game could have been.
To conclude, I don’t think Starfield’s May update will be enough to drastically change its reception or pull back all of the missing players, but it still looks like a great patch. The most important thing is, this is a step in the right direction, where the game studio is finally pushing beyond bug fixes and taking a look at the experience as a whole. It may take time to get to a point where all of my complaints are addressed, but I believe this is a game worth waiting for.