Video games: Starfield’s galaxy-size sci-fi adventure
“A video game with a thousand explorable planets shouldn’t exist, yet here it is,” said Gene Park in The Washington Post. Bethesda Game Studios shot for the moon with its new role-playing game for PC and Xbox, “a marvel of engineering” that was 10 years in the making and represents the Microsoft-owned studio’s first original franchise in a quarter-century. “It’s impossible to summarize the entirety of the experience,” because Starfield dwarfs even Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a 2011 megahit, in its scope and ambition. Playing as a spacefaring pioneer, you can visit 1,000 alien worlds, and each biome you encounter feels as large as an entire open-world RPG. Granted, Starfield is more an experience than a game, but it attains a level of detail “rarely matched in any entertainment medium.”
The game begins with a routine sci-fi adventure, said Swapna Krishna in NPR.org. A team of explorers travels the galaxy in search of artifacts that might answer humanity’s oldest questions.To find these relics, you delve into a dangerous mine, orchestrate a heist aboard a space baron’s luxury cruiser, and more. But Starfield isn’t bound to its main story: “It wants you to wander and craft your own,” whether you join a gang of space pirates, climb the ranks of an interplanetary corporation, or explore aimlessly, constructing settlements, customizing starships, and cataloging alien flora and fauna. “There’s so much to do, so many characters to meet—and it never really stops.”
“For all of this vastness, Starfield often feels sterile,” said Nicole Carpenter in Polygon. Handcrafting 1,000 planets still isn’t feasible, so Bethesda instead chose to provide players with a mix of bespoke worlds and algorithmically generated environments. The latter “start to blend together,” because many of these landscapes are lifeless deserts. “Yes, there are a lot of barren planets,” said Paul Tassi in Forbes. Starfield aims to capture the desolation of space, and perhaps it would have been better if it had been more focused in its ambitions. “But man, there is a whole lot of beauty. A whole lot. Starfield is going to make a lot of people happy.”