I have certain expectations regarding Bethesda games. I expect large, detailed open worlds to explore, with every hillside possibly bringing a new spectacle, be it a dragon, a super-mutant behemeth, a village of cavemen, Pleistocene megafauna, or a town run by street urchins. The thrill of discovery, of having that cloudy map gradually reveal its secrets, is what separates Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and Fallout games from other similar open world titles. However, a lot has changed in the gaming world since Fallout 4. Games such as the Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Baldur's Gate 3 have upped the ante. All of the aforementioned have great quests, memorable characters, excellent role-playing opportunities, and combat systems that aren't shallow (though the Witcher 3 is really just serviceable in that regard). Some of the foibles of Bethesda titles, namely their half-assed questing, their pototo-faced characters, and janky engine don't exactly cut it nowadays. So when Starfield launched with a somewhat mixed reception, I wasn't exactly surprised. I've finally checked it out via Game Pass, and lemme tell ya, people, it doesn't make a good first impression.
Despite the various visual overhauls, the Creation Engine still can't let the player character open a door without a loading screen. You can't hop in your spaceship and fly up into space like in The Outer Wilds; nope, here's another loading screen. You can wander around the open pathways of New Atlantis, but if you go into any of the buildings, cue a six second loading screen. This limitation of the Creation Engine has existed forever, but its worse in Starfield because it ruins the exploration game loop every Bethesda title is built around. You can roam around the Capital Wasteland or Skyrim for hours if you desire, but that's just not possible in Starfield because everything's broken up into these little loading zones sequestered on separate planets. It reminds me of Deus Ex: Invisible War, a game divided into tiny little areas because the original X Box couldn't handle something like the large maps of the original. Now the Series X and the Series S have limits, but they're fundamentally equivalent in hardware spec to mid-range pcs. Both are equipped with Zen 2 8 core processors, RDNA 2 gpus, and ssds. There's absolutely no hardware specific reason for Starfield's plethora of loading screens, especially when games like Cyberpunk 2077 accomplish much more visually with better hardware scalability. Why, for instance, does my framerate dip below 60 fps in New Atlantis when its streets are barely occupied with pedestrians, not to mention no vehicles? Night City runs and looks so much better.
My second big complaint is the interface, which is just terrible. Inventory items are stacked on the left side of the screen in categories, necessitating multiple clicks. The star map looks kind of fancy but it's confusing to browse. Why can't every game just use a basic grind inventory like in Baldur's Gate 3? It's a design that's existed since the dawn of time, but Bethesda just can't figure it out.
Nor can they figure out how to model human faces. If an indie studio like Larian can make a face like this:
Then why can't Bethesda, a big studio backed by Microsoft, produce anything better than this for one of their main characters?
So far my gameplay experience has consisted of one brief episode of combat, followed by a quest to go to Mars, where I talked to two people in a mining operation that looked gigantic outside but was really just one hallway indoors. I picked up a quest to put a tracking beacon on top of a launch pad, but I couldn't scale it because I didn't have the jet booster training, so I had to fast travel to Venus, I guess, because there was nothing left to do on Mars. I've only played about an hour, but I can already tell that Bethesda hasn't updated their approach, and in a world full of great RPGs, I'm not sure potato-faced NPCs, fetch quests, and loading screens are going to hold my interest before I abandon this dated game for something better.
I do like the art design, however. Retro-futurism is the shit.
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