Pre-Early Access Starfield Review (9.7/10)

As one of the few who had the privilege to play Starfield before most of the world, I am going to be giving you my full, honest review and rating of Bethesda Game Studios’ highly anticipated new IP while also addressing the potential consumer concerns and misgivings a lot of you may have had while waiting for this new universe, the first unique creation by BGS in 25 years. There will be no spoilers said or shown so don’t worry as I’m going to look at the core elements and systems rather than specific stories. For all things Starfield, check out StarfieldWiki.net run by the team behind UESP who I’m partnering up with. 

Before we get into the thick of it, I want to go over the specs and hours I put into Starfield. I reviewed Starfield through Steam on PC – not a Xbox Series X or S – for almost 80 hours for about a week straight so take that into context when I talk about certain things. I primarily used a mouse and keyboard though of course I fiddled around with a Razer Wolverine controller which I will talk about later. My main rig has a 2080 TI graphics card with a i9-9900k CPU and I used both an ultrawide Samsung Odyssey G9 monitor along with an Alienware 25 gaming monitor to test if the game could be ran on specific resolutions and turns out it can without issues. 

The minimum and recommended specs for Starfield listed by Bethesda as reference are as follows on the screen: 

MINIMUM 

RECOMMENDED 

Starfield sits at a whopping size of 116.27 gigabytes as of August 29, if you are downloading through Stream, I would make sure to have about 125 gigabytes available in the drive you are installing Starfield to. If you want to try out the game for free, just a reminder as well that Starfield will available for free on Game Pass for Xbox and PC if you are subscribed to either one. 

Performance and Bugs 

With the specs context set now properly, I want to talk first about the performance and bugs of Starfield just to get this part out of the way as these aspects have been two of the most asked about things leading up to the early access launch. And it’s a totally valid area to be worried about as both a gamer and consumer especially since a lot of people have associated and experienced a plethora of bugs, glitches and gamebreaking issues with previous Bethesda Game Studios IPs like Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. Previously this year, Xbox executives have rather confidently stated that Starfield will be the least buggy Bethesda game to ever launch which of course I was also skeptical about like many others. After playing Starfield however, it dawned on me that they weren’t lying. Compared to the issues I had with Skyrim or Fallout 4, Starfield runs extremely smoothly.

At the highest settings minus motion blur with my specs, my FPS sat anywhere between 90 to over 110 FPS and even in high intensity areas where there were multiple explosions and actions going on, the FPS loss was barely noticeable and there was no stuttering at all in any moment of the game I played. I only crashed a single time although that might be because I had the game running for 15 hours at one point and I only experienced one unusually long loading screen about 40 hours into my playthrough. The great performance was super surprising considering how many planets, weather systems, objects and particles are moving at the same time in this bad boy at any given time and such factors are probably the rationale behind why the FPS is locked to 30 on the Xbox Series X and S. 

Now, are there bugs? Well absolutely yes and in the first 25 hours of my playthrough, I experienced about 5 bugs which are the very familiar Bethesda bugs you all know and love such as NPCs glitching into a big crate, NPCs standing behind a stair rail with a death stare, there’s some cosmetics clipping such as helmet stands on ships being placed in weird spots, quest NPCs having a hard time sticking to their pathing, the NPC you’re talking to being pushed by another NPC during dialogue and a lighting glitch in your character screen that makes your character hard to see. Of course all of these mentioned bugs didn’t impede my gameplay and they didn’t happen frequently at all and it felt like I had to really try hard to break things or really scrutinize every single part of the environment to see if there were any outstanding bugs. The only serious and annoying bug I encountered in the game was when I couldn’t move or shoot or aim left or right or do anything really except load to a previous save when I ADS’ed using a scope in zero gravity environments which also caused first person view after switching from third person view to become really wonky.

So with all that being said however, Starfield runs surprisingly well and is devoid of a lot of the issues that have plagued previous BGS games in the past. There were no quest bugs that blocked me from progressing or things that forced me to troubleshoot through the ingame console like I had to do on multiple occassions for Skyrim. Certainly it helps that by the time you’re watching this video, the Starfield version all of you will be playing is v1.7.22 which by the way was another patch sent out by Bethesda during our early review process which was a strong indication that they really wanted Starfield to not be your typical BGS game. For reference, the Fallout 4 launch was v1.1 or v1.1.21 and that game’s v1.7 patch came out in August 2016, 9 months after its November 2015 release. And I’m sure once more people play this game, there may potentially be more issues or bugs found that I never encountered. Yet just like how many people were willing to overlook performance and subjective issues in Act III of the phenomenal Baldur’s Gate 3 recently just because Baldur’s Gate 3 delivered such a great experience, I truly believe the same will happen for Starfield because this game truly is almost perfect. 

Settings and Accessibility 

The accessibility options of increasing or adjusting text alongside the five levels of difficulty in Starfield which include Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard and Very Hard seem welcoming once you consider how many systems in this game there are. The Save on Rest, Save on Wait, Save on Travel and the option to save your game if you spend 5, 10 , 15 , 30, 45, or 60 minutes on your pause menu were really nice to see. And of course there is controller compatibility for those who don’t want to play with mouse and keyboard. Combat interface options for things such as crosshairs, floating markers, damage numbers and other elements of the heads-up-display are also present. 

Graphic settings include a lot of what gamers have come to expect such as shadow quality, reflection quality, depth of field and more. One notable thing is that Starfield at least on PC also gives you the option to reduce or increase crowd density which refers to how many NPCs you’d like to see wandering around in settlements or cities for either immersion or performance reasons. The decision to not include NVIDIA DLSS is rather puzzling and something that could be overlooked if they add it later on.

I would like to bring up the fact that there weren’t any Field of View options for either first or 3^rd person views which I felt like would have been a great quality of life addition to Starfield’s settings. I would highly advise turning off Motion Blur in Starfield if you’re gonna play a lot of this in first person as the FOV can’t be changed at least in the base game. 

Audio and Music 

The music, ambience or just audio in general for Starfield is absolutely awesome. That first moment when you’re just loading into the main menu which by the way looks a lot better than that leaked screenshot people were fuming over for no reason, gives you absolute goosebumps. The soundtracks and music for specific moments in storylines and your playthrough of Starfield are spot on. The music can instill a sense of wonder, anxiety, excitement or bewildering awe at the perfect moments when you’re exploring moons, planets or warping away to another solar system. The audio for literally everything like the voice acting, your ships, events, alien creatures, weapons and everything else contribute to an incredibly immersive experience that delivers on Todd Howard’s statement of Starfield being a Bethesda RPG through and through 

Character Customization

Character customization is going to be something you could spend an hour on easily. There’s a good variety of options, colors, adjustment sliders, fine tuning and presets you can tinker around with although I personally would have liked a few more hair options. Regardless of my desire, it can’t be denied that Starfield delivers on its promise to let you mold your character if you know what you’re doing to be whatever you want it to be.  Beyond the physical attributes of your character, you can also choose your character’s background and traits based on your head canon of who your character is. Your Background options include being a Beast Hunter, a Diplomat, a Gangster, a space Ronin and quite a few more unexpected options including a blank slate option should you feel none of the other options match your character.  

Each background gives you three starting Skills while also giving you unique Dialogue and Choice options when interacting with other characters in the universe or during questlines which was really nice to see. I chose Gangster as my background in my first playthrough and this made other characters a bit more suspicious of me or if they’d looked me up warn me to not try anything. During dialogue, I had more aggressive things to say just because I had the Gangster background. 

And finally for the Three Traits you can choose for your character, these traits can also give you similar things to your Background but also other bonuses. Maybe you want to start with a luxury home that you have to pay a weekly mortgage on. Or you want to meet your character’s parents in game with the Kid Stuff trait. How about gaining access to specific faction resources? Or if you want to meet the Adoring Fan and his voice actor from Oblivion and be put on a pedestal anywhere you go, you can go with Hero Worshipped. Or maybe you want to feel Wanted in a very different way and want to have bounty hunters chase after you with an enigmatic entity posting ever higher rewards on your head. It’s pretty much all there. Once you choose your Background and Three Traits, you can’t respec these as far as I could tell. However you can change your character’s appearance through a certain business ingame later on. 

HUD / UI / UX 

As you start playing the game for the first time, you might be liable to miss some menu options in certain things like ship editing as the text can be small or hard to miss. I think more importantly some people will be thrown off not by the aesthetics of the user interface but more so by the user experience of the various menus and functional systems you get introduced to such as the Scanner. I think the HUD for the Scanner in terms of the aesthetics and functionality in a vacuum is fine but when you need to turn off the scanner to interact with things like doors, it just feels like an unnecessary extra step to me. I also feel like at least for the mouse and keyboard bindings and interface, that the menus from transitioning to and from the map or to other parts of the menu could have been done a bit better and before you say oh well the modders will take care of it, again I just think the base game regardless of developer or IP should simply take such things into account.

It definitely feels like the UI and UX was tailored more with a Xbox controller in mind before mouse and keyboard especially when it came to the Ship Building and Editing. Other than that, I think once you stop getting overwhelmed by the content and systems in the game and you start familiarizing yourself more with everything, it will start to feel a little second nature though probably not as fast as you’d like.

My biggest complaint with this aspect of the game is definitely the map. The map is, well, not exactly your traditional kind of map. It threw me off quite hard as the map at least on the planetary level only showed the topography with points of interest which I kind of get for unexplored planets or areas but I’m not sure why a map of New Atlantis or another major city doesn’t have an actual layout. I mean we’re in the 24^th century and we don’t have a detailed city map we can download? Again, there may be a rationale behind this and it was a slightly risky one, I think BGS probably wanted us to utilize the quest marking system in conjunction with the Scanner that shows a pathway to your marked location or quest while you explore. And maybe they wanted you to be more immersed rather than popping up a map every 5 seconds.  

Graphics, Art and Environment 

In my opinion, the graphics and art particularly when it came to trying to portray certain planets as scientifically accurate as possible based on NASA’s research were incredibly well done. If you’re a physicist, astronomer or just a science enjoyer, Starfield is going to definitely hit the spot on that front. Different weather systems and different times on over 1000 planets is certainly a remarkable feat especially at the same time and this is all reflected in your map of the known galaxy. You will see that even if it’s daytime in the city of Neon, it’s nighttime or something in Akila City. The little details of space ship traffic, crowds and active movement of characters truly do add to the experience of Starfield.

The environmental and creature art depending on the vista you visited was quite breathtaking and really drew you into the experience of simply being there, running away or getting into fights if you wanted to. Environments can be explorer-friendly, extremely dangerous, low gravity, high gravity and be desolate or bountfiul and everything in between. The design of outfits, clothing and yes the spacesuits feel very appropriate and pragmatic because space is a dangerous place not to be taken lightly. If I had to call the style of a lot of the packaged foods, ship modules and equipment something, I’d call it the NASApunk aesthetic. At the end of the day, the assets in the game will speak for themselves and I really feel like players and of course the modders will have a genuinely good time with it all. 

Companions and NPCs 

Not every single character as alluded to by the gameplay setting of adjusting crowd size is named or specific to a random quest. Just like Baldur’s Gate 3, you will meet a mix of both uniquely named and the generically named NPCs such as Citizen or Security Guard. This doesn’t detract from the immersive atmosphere of the cities and planets you can visit but it’s definitely worth exploring the named characters’ background stories and their issues. I was quite enamored and engaged with a lot of the background characters especially the crew members you can hire. Many of the main characters and side characters were quite relatable but I found it surprising that random crew members you could hire from various locations had their own stories going on that made you feel their issues. In terms of combat, both enemy and ally NPCs seem to do okay on the normal difficulty whereas on the Hard and Very Hard difficulties, it feels like the enemy NPCs do have a bit more awareness of when they should take cover or when they should try to reposition or run away in addition to packing much more damage.  

I want to talk a bit about Companions at this point in terms of their utility and also stories. You can store items on Companions using the trade option in dialogue selection. Companions do have a limit on much they can hold. Item transfer is one item type at a time (not multi select) but you can trade multiple of one item as a side note. And as I talked about already with the woes of NPCs, the storylines and conversations you can pursue with your Companions really hit its mark. And yes you can romance the Companions, it’s actually rather interesting how easy – at least for me – it was to rizz them up. Having Companions can also introduce a way for them to take part in the conversations you have with other characters or even having them speak for you which was pretty interesting and took on a nice immersive quality that I feel like was missing from the older BGS games. 

The Universe (Story and Lore) 

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” Starfield’s stories truly exemplify Douglas Adams’ famous quip from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Starfield will undoubtedly be a game of a generation that many will play for the next 10 years given the sheer scope and potential of the game that far outstrips previous Bethesda Game Studios projects. And this applies to its plots and story writing. In a recent developer interview, it was stated that the writers felt like Starfield was their best story writing by far compared to their previous works with Elder Scrolls and Fallout which is saying something considering the massive amount of lore and communities that have been built around either of those IPs.

I would agree as far as the main questline goes with how the Companion questlines can also interact with it, that it’s definitely better than the previous BGS games I’ve played, just as good if not better than in my opinion Fallout New Vegas. If the theme of Fallout was that war or rather human nature never changes and a strong theme of the Elder Scrolls universe is that the force of history and perspectives often obscure reality – Starfield’s theme combines both motifs and adds a bit more to it by forcing the player to look at not just humanity but themselves in relation to the vastness of a literally infinite universe. This almost futile and hopeless theme of humanity as a species and civilization waging primitive and petty conflicts over infinite space and resources has been explored in media time and time again including a favorite show of mine: Legend of the Galactic Heroes. And Starfield fully explores this theme without hesitation by not just examining said theme but letting the player fully understand it by getting involved with the actual lives of the people and natural wonders within the game. 

There is a good amount of presented lore that can be easily understood by a lot of the audience. In no way is Starfield’s storytelling or lore open to interpretation or esoteric compared to Elden Ring or the Elder Scrolls universe as much of the information can be presented directly to the player. There’s also a good amount of environmental storytelling through slates – the equivalent of lorebooks in Starfield -, notes, the physical remnants or evidence of what happened and so on. I would equate the lore and its presentation more closely to Fallout than anything else if I had to make a comparison. 

Combat 

The combat in Starfield is straightforward and quite enjoyable when you take into account that it can affect not just the usual environmental tropes such as exploding gas tanks but the combat can be affected by the environment as well. For example, if you shoot a ballistic weapon in a zero G environment, the force of the bullets will propel you backwards so that’s something you have to take into account when fighting multiple enemies with certain weapons in said environments. There seems to be bullet drops in Earthlike gravity environments but these only seem to kick in at greater distances and of course distance does affect the severity of your gun’s damage for example you can’t snipe someone with a pistol from 200 meters away. The gunplay had me a little worried initially when I picked up the first handgun available to players during the tutorial phase of the game because man that pistol feels awful to use. However once I started picking up other guns, swords, axes, knives and more, each weapon felt very different and produced a decent tactile feel when I used them so if you get worried by that tutorial handgun’s gunplay, don’t be.

Of course various Skills, consumables whether they be drinks or drugs and the mods on your weapons can also affect your combat experience quite heavily. To just pick up a gun and use it then say oh that’s Starfield combat would be like playing Dead Island 2 with just a stick and never trying to experiment with anything else then saying you didn’t enjoy Dead Island 2. Whether it’s through the extreme environment around you or from enemy attacks or even self-injury, you can be afflicted by an array of status effects. You can have a sprained ankle, dislocated limb, you can be poisoned, have burns, have frostbite and so on. All of this can affect various stats including your Max Health, Oxygen regeneration, combat capabilities and more which in turn can be solved by consumables or treatment by doctors. Jumping and sprinting can also deplete your oxygen and upon complete depletion of your oxygen, your CO2 or carbon dioxide level starts going up and if you get filled up on carbon dioxide, your health starts taking damage. On top of all this you of course can have a Companion with their own Skills and abilities accompany you on your on-foot adventures while you can assign both Companion and Crew members to your space ship which actually gives you added bonuses if they have any combat or passive bonuses for space ships. 

I also don’t want to spoil anything but there’s also a deeper layer of combat gameplay that I think players will love and be familiar with that adds to the already decent experience of Starfield without mods. Speaking of familiar combat systems, for those of you who are Fallout or even Red Dead Redemption fans, slow-mo targeting is in the game when you get into space dogfights with your ship. You can target enemy ships’ shields, engines, weapon systems and their grav drives after you lock onto them with your ship weapons which definitely helped the space combat feel a bit more manageable because the way combat or even just speed or movement in the space of Starfield works is heavily inspired by the experiences of astronauts in our reality.

There is no up or down in space really, and Starfield’s space combat and movement really exemplifies this concept. Furthermore another layer to space ship combat or even stealth lies in the ability to allocate power to different parts of your ship. If you want to go by a fleet of ships undetected, you have to risk it and power down your shields and weapons while keeping minimal engine power  so they don’t detect your ship’s power as you traverse. If you want to allocate more power to your shields, you can decide on allocating that power from offensive or grav drive I.e. fleeing capabilities. Overall, at normal and above difficulties, players might be surprised to learn that they may have to get gud depending on the situation and how many ships or enemies you’re up against. Starfield is a game where I can run up to people to punch them to death in an age of advanced technology but doing so recklessly or outnumbered can get you killed pretty fast. 

Stealth and Pickpocketing

Stealth and Crouching is present in Starfield and both actions modify your attacks as Sneak Attacks. Of course pickpocketing is affected by being stealthy. Interestingly, pickpocketing NPCs don’t count as pickpocketing until you actually take something from them. 

Ships

Speaking of ships, the ship building in Starfield is absolutely insane. Ships can be stolen, or purchased with credits. You can also choose to create or modify your own ships and while you can take apart ships you own, it didn’t seem like you could sell them entirely or their parts to work on a different ship. At least though for the ship you’re modifying, you can also delete the pieces and in return receive credits to be able to afford better parts for that ship. I didn’t seem able to use pieces of one ship to be added to different ship such as taking weapons from one ship and connecting them to a cargo ship. You can change the colors of individual pieces and also duplicate them, some ship parts have different variants you can change them to, like changing the Engineering Bay to a Living Quarters. Different features to the ships compartments include decorative pieces, functional pieces, weapons, structural, and landing gear.

I think a lot of people will be spending weeks upon weeks with just this part of the game as it can get pretty indepth and fun the more parts you can get access to. I myself built what I have named Blueballs to see if ship building truly is late game as Todd Howard has stated. With no Starship Design skill and a limited 30,000 credit budget I still managed to build a large 2-level ship to satisfy my desire and needs of cargo space to store all my junk while also giving enough space for my crew members and of course my very own captain’s quarters. Ship layouts can be different dependent on how long or big or small you make your ships. There is a lot of items that spawn in on the various compartments or areas you build into your ship like coffee mugs and so on. There’s even storage boxes, closet space, weapon racks, mannequins for your space suits, crafting stations and more cool things you can add to your ship. 

Exploration & Content

 Beyond the ship building system, what may be disappointing to some people initially as it was for me is that unlike No Man’s Sky or other games, you can’t really manually land ships or manually travel to other planets or systems. So no you can’t manually input keys on your ship’s controls to coordinate the docking process if you were wondering. Grav drive jumps to other solar systems, docking to other star stations or ships and landing on different celestial bodies are basically loading or semi-loading screens. Furthermore, you can’t explore an entire moon or planet in just one landing. You can only explore a rather big tilemap with borders that give you travel options at the location you land that can take maybe 15-25 minutes to go from one side to another depending on terrain, oxygen or gravity with your boostpack from one side to another with a bunch of things in between. 

It seems you can land at about three locations on a moon or planet before the first location resets assuming you didn’t explore any of it. Each tilemap seems to have procedurally generated points of interests assuming the area you landed in was not a handcrafted location such as a city or pre-existing area before you get there. Starfield is definitely not a full-on space or space exploring simulator, it’s more of a Bethesda RPG set in our galaxy with a bunch of other things added onto it. And no you can’t go into a gas giant because well, you’d get crushed to death anyway. All of this starts making sense the more you look at exactly how much content and how much pardon the pun, space, is in Starfield. The amount of distance one would have to cover manually is mindboggling from Alpha Centauri to Sol alone so instead of boosting your ship for 20 minutes, I’d much rather fast travel with the grav drive anyway and I feel like once you explore a few procedurally generated areas of a moon or planet, it feels like you’ve seen enough of it at a certain point. Multiply that by a 1001 planets that are in Starfield and you’ve got a lot of exploring to do. I will say that at least once in my 80 hours of playtime the procedurally generated POIs can literally be the same. For example I explored a collapsed mine POI on Mars that was near the capital city on Mars.  

Then 20 hours later when I went to a random moon sometime later and saw a Collapsed Mine POI and went inside, it was literally the same exact layout and appearance of the Mars Collapsed Mine albeit without a piece of lore or environmental storytelling that was present in the Mars mine. So there definitely may be slightly less unique content at times for you to explore. I think with all of this aside, the enjoyment of exploring so many different environments slowly crept up on me as I continued playing. To be honest, I think the biggest and bravest risk BGS took with Starfield was not having land vehicles. I understand that they want players to use their Scanners to scan the flora, fauna and landmarks of the areas they land in.

I understand they want players to not skip by points of interests or even resources they could be gathering and to become immersed in the environments they discover. I understand that they’ve let players Fast Travel to any discovered point of interest but I think at a certain point on certain featureless planets with high gravity, initially exploring can become a little tedious even with a boostpack especially if you don’t even need to gather resources depending on your inventory management or resource needs. I genuinely think that it’s not going to be anything else I’ve mentioned thus far players may have issues with in the future but instead the BGS team’s design choice of not letting players choose to use some sort of rover or vehicle to traverse certain environments – especially in a sci-fi setting – if they wanted to will certainly be a risk many may discuss in retrospect in the future.

As far as questing goes, there’s a lot to do and I’m not even including the repeatable mission board quests you can take to make some extra credits on the side whether you want to be a space trucker or a bounty hunter. You do have your typical fetch side quests but a lot of the quests and quest chains are done in a way that definitely draw you into what’s going on regardless of what they want you to do. You want to keep continuing the questlines not just to complete it for the sake of completing it but because you’re curious as to where it’s all going and how it will end for everyone involved with either disastrous or great results. And man, there are some really disastrous things that can occur if you’re an absolute madman. 

Persuasion System

There is a Persuasion system in Starfield much like in Fallout and Skyrim. You essentially have an allotted number of turns to persuade a character to do what you want them to do whether it’s dissuading them from being violent or maybe you don’t feel like doing what they asked and want to shortcut your way through a part of the quest. The persuasion system seems to be based on a combination of chance that you can boost with a Skill in addition to what the character you’re trying to persuade wants to hear. 

Lockpicking System

 There is a lockpicking system in Starfield and you do it with well, digital lockpicks like the cool kids do. They’re called digipicks and you digipick things for digimon monsters. The lockpicking minigame is actually enjoyable and if I had to summarize it, though I will make a quick guide video on this later for the channel, you simply have to match the keys to the slots starting with the outer ring while ensuring you have the correct keys from the remaining pool of the key patterns you haven’t used for the inner ring slots otherwise you have to redo it consuming more digipicks. 

Inventory System

Early game inventory management can definitely be a challenge or nightmare especially if you’re a loot goblin. However inventory management and space can be easily solved by investing into Skills that let you carry more, actively using your Companion’s carry capacity or even using your ship as your personal storage unit which of course you can expand upon with the ship building system by adding more cargo modules. Probably the biggest inventory obstacles is accumulating resource materials for crafting that can have a wild variety of weights. The downside of having too much over your carry weight limit or being over-encumbered is not slower movement speed but instead your ability to regain oxygen as you move. Instead, if you’re over your carry capacity, even if you’re not running, you will be running out of oxygen and encountering the carbon dioxide mechanism. The only way to avoid this is to, you guessed it, jetpack. Beyond the early game, inventory management is not too bad or tedious. One thing I’d like to tell players at this point that if you want to keep the same cargo you have on one ship and you want to use a different one, you have to manually transfer the old cargo to the new ship so that could add like 30 more seconds to your inventory management minigame. 

Economy, Housing, Research and Crafting 

To start off this section of the video, there are no microtransactions or a microtransaction store within Starfield. Something I shouldn’t have to say but for some reason a lot of people seem to think there was going to be a microtransaction store in the game. The ingame economy sort of makes sense although I feel like a lot of the prices probably warrant their own lore video. What’s cool is that instead of selling all your junk and loot at one vendor or merchant, each vendor and merchant has a limited amount of credits they can use to buy your stuff anyway which forces you to look for others or go to a Trade machine to sell for lower prices. There is a Skill that lets you sell things for higher prices if you wish to pursue the mercantile aspect of Starfield. There is housing in Starfield available for purchase in cities and settlements. Some of the housing is available through just straight up purchasing while a couple of the others I stumbled upon you could procure through a questline.

I touched on mods and stuff for weapons earlier in the video and we gotta talk a little bit about the crafting systems in Starfield. Crafting and research are very simple and straightforward. All you need to do is collect materials and ingredients to complete research that unlocks more things to craft and using those same materials and ingredients to also craft items such as medicine, bandages, food, weapon attachments and so on.  There’s also a way to assemble more complex crafting pieces with industrial workbenches that can be used for more item crafting. All in all, I found the crafting to be intuitive and simple enough to not be overwhelming and the user experience of most of the crafting felt more comfortable to use compared to other systems. 

Outposts

If I had to concisely explain the Outpost system from what I played around with, it’s basically making your own mini settlement on whatever area of whatever planet or moon you decide on that you can use to extract or mine resources. And the building itself like construction of furniture, structures, power production and product production is not at all complicated. It’s basically playing a very simplified version of the game Satisfactory where you essentially funnel a production line into a storage unit which you can collect from later after you’re done adventuring and want to check up on things. You can set up defenses for your outposts as well and I really do like how straightforward it ended up being as it helped the game not feel too overwhelming just as they did with the crafting. Starfield’s Outpost system is basically an improvement I feel like on Fallout 4’s system as well with the added ability to add unique and unnamed crew members to help you maintain and boost productivity of the Outpost while you’re away. From what I can tell the Outpost system just like the ship building can get pretty crazy as well. 

Length

Most people will probably be curious about how long it will take them to beat the full game. I have no idea. I think 80, 100 or 500 hours isn’t enough to 100% Starfield even as a single character. It’s a game when you first start playing feels like you’ve seen an ocean for the first time in your life. And as you start exploring more of it, you realize almost hopelessly there’s even more to explore. For the main questline, if you want to power through it, depending on difficulty, it could be maybe 25 to 30 hours. If you want to take your time, it will probably be over 30-35 hours and if you’re gonna do all the sidequests and activities as you take your time on the main questline, it could be easily north of 100 hours. 

I cannot talk about how the new game+ works because it’s so interwoven with not just the story but also basically the rest of the game and I would say it’s heavy spoilers. What I will say is that I think the New Game+ concept and how it was handled by BGS in Starfield will definitely surprise and impress people. 

Conclusion

As its own game that will more than likely be explored for years and years to come by millions of people on planet Earth, Starfield certainly delivers on a lot of different fronts. It has something for everybody, perhaps not as indepth as some would like when it comes to the thing they like the most but all of it is certainly there. At the end of the day it’s a Bethesda RPG through and through, it may not be The Elder Scrolls VI or Fallout 69 but it’s certainly something just as big if not bigger. On its own merits and my playtime experience in reviewing it, I have to give Starfield a 9.7/10; despite some of the subjective and a couple of objective flaws I found with it, it delivers as a really great game that will undoubtedly be played for years and years to come especially with mods.

Just like with other highly acclaimed games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring and so on, you can tell a lot of work, thought and passion were put into Starfield – not that all game devs in general don’t put passion into their projects – but the efforts by BGS into tackling something much bigger than their previous works can be clear to the layman who have no understanding of how game development works.