Grant Taylor-Hill·
News
··3 min read

One Month Later, I’ve Forgotten About Starfield

starfield

I was just as hyped as anyone else in the weeks before Starfield’s release. It was a tough position to be in, reporting on the leaks while trying everything possible to avoid spoilers, but I managed it. I was locked in from the minute it went live, and in the earliest days of the game’s lifecycle, I poured time, effort, and money into the game. That’s right – money. I enjoyed it so much that I went out a week later and bought the Constellation Edition.

But now, just one month after Starfield was released, I’ve basically forgotten about the game entirely. I completed the story and felt absolutely no drive to jump into NG+. By that point, I’d completed all the side content, too – all that was left was building outposts, playing around with ships, and scanning planets.

Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Let me preface my point with a bit of a backstory: I love Bethesda’s games. I’ve lost thousands of hours of my life to Fallout 4 – and still play it today – and I’ve logged more time than I would like to admit in Fallout 76. Back in the day, I was an absolute fiend for Skyrim, too.

So, what’s wrong with Starfield? Why have I totally lost interest in the game after just one month?

Firstly, I felt as though the game, despite being set in a universe with around 1,500 planets, didn’t have all that much to do or discover. For the most part, ‘randomised’ locations were rinse-and-repeat duplicates, and there’s only so much time you can run around scanning plants and alien creatures.

I wrapped the story up relatively quickly, completed the questlines for the factions, ticked some achievement-based boxes, and pummeled space pirates wherever I came across them, but it felt like too repetitive a loop for me to really stay engaged.

I’ve got no interest in building a resource-gathering factory in an outpost somewhere, and I don’t want to spend hours building all different kinds of ships. Also, I don’t care to mod the game – and even the official mod tools coming next year don’t interest me.

Buck The Trend

It’s sad, in a way. I went into Starfield extremely hopeful, adamant that the game was brimming at the seams with potential, and with less than 100 hours played, it has now been shelved. It failed to keep my attention for more than a couple of weeks, and by the end of that, I was offered NG+ and turned it down. I understand the concept of it and why it’s so ‘special’ in Starfield, I just don’t want to do it.

By stark contrast, I’ll happily go back and start a new run-through of Fallout 4 any day of the week – or Fallout 3, even. For games set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, they somehow manage to feel more alive than Starfield, and infinitely more engaging and replayable – even without NG+ initiatives.

Of course, it doesn’t help that there’s a solid line-up of games coming in the next couple of months to sway my attention. I’m already neck-deep in Assassin’s Creed Mirage and can say quite honestly that it – for me – is a much more worthwhile purchase than Starfield.

Perhaps I’ll revisit Starfield when the Shattered Space expansion launches next year, but until then, I don’t think I’ll even keep the game installed.

For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news regarding the Advanced Warfare weapons coming to MW3

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Grant Taylor-Hill
Grant is a lifelong, multi-platform gamer with a passion for journalism and more than ten years' experience in the industry. He'll try any game once, and when he's not playing them, he's watching them, being as he is an avid esports fan.

3 Comments

  1. I’m not too big of a Bethesda fan. But i did finish Skyrim and FO4. I didn’t even finish Starfield. It’s so bad.

  2. It has it’s problems, but that’s pretty harsh. That and Fallout 4 was complete rubbish and one of the most nonsensical stories in gaming. I have a character that runs the Institute and the whole organization still makes zero sense. The main story and factions are terrible. Starfield needs things. It needs vehicles to make exploration more enjoyable, it needs a much expanded settlement system, it needs another pass on it’s planetary generationt tech, but I’m enjoying the game far more than Skyrim or Fallout 4. That and you have to kind of be lying because you can’t possible see all the content on one playthrough. You have to choose sides in different situations and there’s content that only becomes available after you plunge into newgame+, but if you don’t like it, you don’t like it I guess.

  3. Couldn’t agree more. I went in with a bit of hope, bit of skepticism, but ultimately I thought I’d enjoy at least the old Bethesda gameplay loop I loved in fallout 3, 4, oblivion and Skyrim. But it mostly felt lifeless for me. It had its moments for sure, but even those moments where I wasn’t finding the game monotonous and dull weren’t anything to write home about. Off work atm so had a lot of time to kill, and I pushed myself at about 50 hours thinking it will get better than this, as that’s what I’d heard. But it didn’t, at 80 hours, while having completed 3 faction quest lines and being around 80-90% through the main quest (according to igns walkthrough which I used to check), I was utterly bored and felt no compulsion to continue so I figured I’d shelve it and return at a later date at least to finish the main quest. Cyberpunk was calling me back and I’ve had immensely more fun with the new update and expansion than I had for 80 hours of starfield.

    Getting that amount of time out of me isn’t bad, I’ve played games for less, not finished them and still had fond memories, but most of what I’ll remember of starfield is… how unmemorable it is. I don’t think I’ll ever return and if I do it’ll only be to tick a box. The games main grievance is that it doesn’t push the genre forward at all in the ways that oblivion, then fallout, then Skyrim did before it. Their games always felt like they had a big jump, well maybe until fallout 4 but even that was better than this. Starfield just feels like their ambition drowned them and they couldn’t actually create a fun game. Real shame as Bethesda are a one of a kind company, if this is what they release after 7 since fallout 4, they are effectively dead to me. I now have no hype for ES6 as if this is the kind of product they put out as their first new ip in ages and with so much investment and time behind it, I have no faith they’ll do better in the future ever again.

    Todd Howard is a dinosaur in the industry at this point and if he honestly thinks this is good enough, he’s mad.

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