Why did Xbox and Bethesda
Softworks keep review copies of Starfield back from UK and European voices? It's a very interesting question isn't it? Is it because they didn't have enough? For
a digital first product that seems unlikely. Was it because they forgot we existed? It’s
possible. America crowns World Champions for domestic sports afterall, having not taken
on the rest of the world. {cough cough, Basketball World Cup, cough cough} There is a
distinct possibility they don't know we exist. More likely though, it was
to control the narrative. The publications left out are not ones to toe
a party line or say what developers want them to say in a review. They are honest and will call
out faults. Which is great for the reader, viewer, however people are intaking that media, but not
so much for a publisher desperately needing a win. You see, Starfield needed to deliver. It was the
last chance saloon for Bethesda after Fallout 76 and Redfall, but it was also looking like
last chance saloon for Xbox as a whole, especially with Phil Spencer's
words of just a few months prior. There was backtracking, PR managing and a lot
of "Well Actually"s before launch when content creators and outlets explained why they wouldn't
have a Starfield Review live come embargo day. Ever question why Skill Up doesn't have a
Starfield Review but does for Immortals of Aveum? This is the guy that lambasted The Last of Part
2 remember, the Game Awards Game of the Year for 2020. Are you as a developer going to put a
must win game in his hands for honest review? Why were EuroGamer still working on their
review more than a week after launch? A 6 out of 10 score should
give you insight into that. The Edge only got their review out a whole month
after Starfield launched. Another 6 out 10. As is a developers prerogative they picked
and chose who they gave review copies to. But now that it's out in the world,
the rest of us can finally get into the review process of Starfield and offer
a view of it, that isn’t Bethesda curated. Starfield is… OK. In its best moments you rocket down a rabbit
hole of events that create their own narrative. Events leading one into another, cause
and reaction creating an interesting, engaging, often hilarious in one way, shape
or form, unscripted confluence of events. In it's worst moments, which
is what I encountered more of, it is completely barren. There is
no life, no engagement, no activity, substance… Essentially nothing of anything
that makes a video game a video game. I can't really put it any
more succinctly than that. The two ends of the spectrum are so
diametrically opposite to one another that the best descriptive word for it as a whole
entity that I have available to me, is meh. One thing I should point out is that Starfield is
not a bad game by any stretch of any imagination. This isn’t Redfall 2.0. I'm not here to say
don't buy it or don't play it. I’m not going to tell you it is bug riddled or mechanically
broken, that former one being a minor miracle with Bethesda. I'm not even here to tell you the
story is bad, it's actually neither good nor bad, it's just sort of there, serviceable
to push the gameplay around it. What is bad about Starfield is the
disappointment you feel while playing the game, at what could have been, poor design choices
and the sheer boredom that you encounter. There is a wealth of content in Starfield,
there are 1000 planets afterall. Granted you travel to them via menu screens rather
than spaceships, which is very disappointing, but you can visit 1000 planets and do
stuff on all of them. Or you could ignore about 990 of those planets and your
experience won’t be affected at all. It is a great thing however, to have
that level of freedom of choice. But I have a confession for you folks. I haven’t finished Starfield. In fact, I don’t think I ever will. And that should be all of the review you need. But to avoid the flaming torches and
pitchforks. I’m about 10 hours into the game, and when writing this I haven’t played it in a
week and a half, it’ll be about 2 weeks longer by the time this video goes live. And I’ve had
zero inclination to return in that timeframe. My Reason? Despite that wealth of content and
freedom of choice, I am completely bored and disengaged from everything
happening in game. Whilst there is such a high quantity of things to do, none of
them are deep or meaningful, they're all surface level busy work to artificially
inflate playtime numbers, and that sucks! I had heard amazing stories before launch of
exceptional happenings in game. The praising of new game plus and how things evolve on your
10th, 12th and 13th playthrough and so on. The problem for me with those positive
viewpoints is that they demand many tens of hours, maybe even hundreds of
hours, before things start to get good. I'm 10 hours in and am completely disengaged!
To put another 10-20 hours in, just to finish the story once, is so un-enticing to me
that I would rather pick up a second full time job than play any more of Starfield.
At least I'll get paid for the second job. And just to put this out there, I'm
a person who takes pride in finishing the games that they start. But to achieve
that, there has to be a level of give and take. My time and money should be respected
by the games developer. They should deliver an engaging experience that feels worth that
time and monetary investment that I am making. The 17th pirate fight in 2 hours, which is a copy
paste of the previous 16, does not achieve that. But let's get specific shall we. How has Starfield bored me? I want to rewind to the very beginning of the
game. The first hour. The most important hour. This is where a game either
captivates or loses its audience, especially in a service such as game
pass where people can just try a game and see if it's good for them and
immediately drop it if it isn't. And that first hour; is poor. It's not from a narrative standpoint though. I
actually kind of like the intrigue set up that is created before you get to the first major
settlement of New Atlantis. It's not the best story out there, in fact we've seen it hundreds of
times before, but when something works, it works, and the narrative of "I've had visions
from touching a weird alien artefact and this means I now have to be part of an
investigation to find out what this all means, for fear the universe might end or something" Is
perfectly acceptable to push the gameplay along. But that gameplay is awful. The first 20 minutes or so is a follow
quest. One of the "Come with me while I dump exposition upon you" type
quests. The problem with that is that 1, these quests were boring over 10
years ago in Assassin's Creed Black Flag, and 2, if they do have to be present, make the
damn NPC move as fast as the main character. God of War Ragnarok from November 2022
got this right, characters would talk and interact during traversal, but they would
all move at the speed of the player character, in whatever direction they were heading. The
conversations were written and recorded to be told in strategic time frames to ensure
they fit in with specific traversal areas, or they had a means to interrupt the conversation
and return to it later in a very natural manner. Starfield on the other hand has this.
An NPC walking at what appears to be a quarter of the player character pace,
when the player is walking backwards! This is the only gameplay you have for nearly
10 minutes, as the very first interaction of the game. I was so done with this 15 year old design
philosophy, that I was seeing how far away I could get and what I could do before the NPC could catch
up with me to breathe some life into the game. 10 minutes folks. This is the first 10 minutes of Starfield and I'm already looking to self
imposed challenges to keep me engaged. You may think it petty to offer such
harsh criticism to the first 10 minutes of the game. There's many hundreds of hours
thereafter. But this design choice is front and centre. It is the very first thing that
you encounter in Starfield and it's boring. The first thing that they let you interact with,
is a design that was annoying and disengaging in 2012 and ejected by the rest of the industry
by 2016. At best, this is 7 years, or an entire console generation, out of date; and it isn't good
enough as the first taste of the game in 2023. But once the first 20ish minutes of follow quests
are up, you get to go shooty shoot. Gunplay in Starfield, even with the basic guns, is far better
than in any previous Bethesda Softworks title. It's responsive, immediate and feels generally
good. We're not talking Bungie levels of gunplay here, but it is definitely good enough
to be used throughout the entire title. Completing the shooting section however, then
presents the next poor design choice. Cutscenes. Immediately after this fight and looting session,
you enter into a cutscene between your boss and newly arrived space trader dude. That's how much
their names seem to matter in the grand scheme of things after 10 hours of gameplay. And this
background footage is the "cutscene". Back in 2018, with Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Odyssey, I
spoke out against these stationary camera flick cutscenes, because they are laziness personified.
All that's happening is a forced camera angle is being utilised to zoom in on specific characters
when talking. This conversation, these animations, everything being shown in this cutscene
would still happen without the forced camera angles. This design choice is a halfway house of
cutscenes, it means they don't just leave you in control of the character/viewpoint as would happen
in a real conversation or a game like Destiny 2, which also means you could just walk away.
But they also don't have to render cutscenes in engine to include your character and those
talking, fully animated, lit and so on. This choice is the easiest to implement, to keep the
player in a specific spot without removing their perceived autonomy, and still appear as if you
have done some work as a development studio. I hate it as the first cutscene that
they present, let alone 10 hours later. The dialogue choices in this cutscene are all as
arbitrary as in all more recent Bethesda RPG's, meaning they all lead to the same result
giving no consequences further down the line. Once that's all done though you get your first
spaceship and a robot partner! The robo partner is slightly faster than other NPCs but you can
still leave him behind on a jolly backwards jaunt. The ship is initially very cool,
you can mooch about inside, interact with a few specific things and then
get into the cockpit and launch yourself into space. The first time is via a fancy cutscene
which seemed appropriate for the start of my character's journey. Those cutscenes however
are incredibly common with take off and landing, so the initial one does lose its shine a bit
when returning to it. Once in orbit you are taught about the ship's systems and how to
battle in space before being told to go to a different moon to chase down the leader of
the group that just attacked you in orbit. This section is totally serviceable. The
dog fights in space don't feel great, but nor do they feel bad. They serve their
purpose and inject a little bit of threat and urgency into the vacuum of space.
But then you have to go to the new moon, which you cannot fly to. You can be in orbit
over a planet, engage your engines and start moving towards it at a speed of 200….some
form of speed unit… but you feel like you never get closer. Debris from dog fights is shown
on your HUD as being metres away and the speed to get there is slower than walking on a planet.
To get onto a planet you have to fast travel. Honestly the point of the spaceship and associated
mechanics being included at all is brought heavily into question in the first hour when everything
fun to perform with a spaceship is done via menus. That's right, you can only fast
travel in Starfield. There's no ability to fly down to the surface,
to choose your own landing spot, which granted for certain locations makes
perfect sense, but for 990 planets does not. Each time you wish to go somewhere else, you
have to navigate through 3 different menus; Every. Single. Time. One to get into the ship and take off. One to get
into orbit over the new planet you are travelling to. Then the final one to land. And there is a
long loading screen between each different menu. We're on the 9th generation of home consoles with
NVMe SSD's as storage here. We have seen games from this generation, with massive open worlds,
load instantly. Yet here I am in Starfield, a marquee release for Xbox studio's, encountering
what feels like 10 loading screens every hour. I have a loading screen to get into my ship.
To get into the enemy base on the second moon I visit after that ship tutorial. Another loading
screen to then exit onto the roof of that base. 2 loading screens to land on this moon in the first
place and two more to then land on New Atlantis. All of those loading screens are in a
23 minute segment of gameplay. 7 loading screens in 23 minutes. I don't think I
encounter that many in Party Animals, another Xbox console exclusive title that
is PVP based and has 4 minute rounds! Bear in mind that all of these issues that I
have highlighted here are from the very first hour of gameplay and interaction with the game.
There is some gunplay involved and some freedom to explore if you wish before entering the
pirates base. There's Todd Haberkorn voicing the pirate leader and having Natsu Dragneel
appear anywhere is always a good thing. But in the very first hour of the game, they
are the only 2 positives that I remember. That's the dissection of 1 hour. That's a
lot said on one hour of the game. All of the issues that I have with it, are fundamental design
choices that persist throughout the entire title. There's a lot I haven't touched upon, like why
on earth is Y the jump button? Which fool came up with that? I haven't mentioned looting, which you
actually stop doing an hour into the game because you're permanently over encumbered and cannot
fast travel when you are, negatively impacting the actual flow of the game as every next step
of a mission is "Fast travel to new location". I haven't touched on the awfully sluggish
camera regardless of sensitivity settings. I haven't spoken about the incredibly dim AI,
the obtuse menu design, the lifeless eyes of the characters. I haven't spoken about oxygen and CO2
management for *checks notes* walking and running. I haven't spoken about
story, animations, crafting, persuasion. Essentially I haven't spoken about
anything outside of the video game basics. The basics here are poor,
archaic and disappointing, and given how they are presented
front and centre in that first hour, I would not blame any player for putting
the controller down and never returning at that point. Because 9 torturous hours
after that, it's exactly what I've done. I want to highlight one other egregious
issue before I address the crowd who are currently shouting "Well you haven't finished
the game you can't review it" at the screen. And that is
Accessibility. This is the accessibility menu. You can turn subtitles on or off. By comparison, here is the God of War Ragnarok
accessibility menu. A game released 10 months earlier than Starfield from Xbox Game
Studio's competitor PlayStation Studio's. This is not a small difference, it's astronomical. Xbox and Bethesda essentially said, with the lack
of any accessibility features, that if you are not a perfectly able bodied and minded gamer,
they don't want you playing Starfield at all. You're not the sort of person that
they like playing their games. That is discrimination. That lack
of accessibility in 2023 is blatant discrimination against disabled
people, and it is deplorable. This capture, of this menu, is the first
footage I captured of Starfield. I wanted to make a video right then and there
because this level of discrimination, at a cost of $70 to the player, is despicable. No matter what else I think, no
matter the positives or negatives of the rest of the game, this menu alone
should resign Starfield to irrelevance. Now onto the "you haven't finished shut up" crowd. You don’t have to finish a
game to review it, at least, not if it’s an overall negative review.
Telling people why you stopped playing a game, why you could not make it to the end, is one of
the most legitimate and realistic reviews going. People say “Oh you must watch XYZ
movie, it's amazing” all the time, or they’ll ward you off another
one with words like “It’s not a cinema movie”. And it’s the same sort
of word of mouth response for gaming, that’s all a review is at the end of the day, an
individual's word of mouth report on something. To stop playing a game, you have to have met
challenges in that title that any included positives could not overcome, so you could not
continue playing. Relaying those feelings and challenges to other people allows them to then
think on if the experience will be worth it for them, before they drop hard earned money
on it. As we’re all brilliantly unique, your sorrows could be their joy and
your review still helps them massively. So don’t decry someone for reviewing something that they haven’t finished as
long as they can tell you why. Poor core concepts. Archaic design choices
and shallow content throughout are why I personally could not finish even 1 playthrough
of Starfield and they are all valid complaints. Overall I was very disappointed, and that is a sadly
familiar feeling when it comes to Xbox triple A titles at the moment. Their double A’s are
smashing it out of the park, their third party exclusives are amazing, but their homemade
triple A titles, the Halo’s, the Gear’s. The Redfalls and Starfields, everything outside of
the Forza garage feels disappointing at launch. We’re seeing great strides in Halo
Infinites PVP live service content now, but we’re 2 years after the launch of Infinite
before the game is Starting to get good, and the 10 year platform of Single player
stories, has seemingly been abandoned. At the same time we can’t be waiting
10-12 years for each new instalment from these Studios as we have done with
Starfield. It’s not a viable business or play model. 5 years have passed since The
Elder Scrolls 6 were announced by Bethesda, a game Todd Howard says is still at least 5 years
away. Skyrim, the last game in that series, was released 12 years ago in 2011. It'll be 17 years
between instalments if 6 releases in 5 years time. The Initiative was announced as a newly
created Xbox studio (The proper way to grow studio portfolios by the way) at E3 in 2018.
5 Years later nothing has been seen from them. Starfield for me is the latest example in an
ever growing list of Triple A failures from Xbox Game Studio's. There are positives in it
but they aren't numerous or regular enough to overcome the negatives. There is obviously
some form of management issue at the top of Xbox game studios, and it’s sad to see
situations like Starfield keep cropping up, where the initial thought has promise,
but the delivery of that promise is missing when the supposed finished
product is shipped out of the door. If you like deep varying RPGs, Starfield isn’t for
you. If you like a science fiction space opera, Starfield isn’t for you. If you want
something mindless that is very easy to just plod along in while waiting
for your next anticipated release, Starfield can definitely be that game. It is not
one however that I would ever readily recommend. What I can recommend however is this
video review of Final Fantasy XVI. Thank you all so much for tuning in, I
hope you’ve enjoyed this video and until next time folks have yourselves
a fantastic day, and take care.
