Starfield: a very short review

If you follow computer gaming at all, I'm sure you've already learned about Starfield, but just in case: it's an open world RPG set several hundred years into the future, in outer space.

Your adventures consist mostly of flying around from star to star, and then from planet to planet near certain stars. You can land on various planets and (somewhat) explore them. In the Starfield universe, there are a lot of stars, and a lot of planets. Each planet is different, and some of them allow for fairly complex exploration.

As you go around, you have various encounters: with people, with alien life, etc. What you do in those encounters determines a lot of what sort of experiences you have playing Starfield.

Starfield was developed by Bethesda, one of the oldest computer game developers, known for gaming franchises such as The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, so if you know anything about those games, you know a fair amount about what Starfield is like.

As you travel around in the game, you meet different people, who have different stories and viewpoints, and many of those people offer to engage with you. They may operate stores, taverns, hotels, space ports, etc.; they may give you quests; they may become companions and join you on your travels, etc.

There are a lot of quests. If you don't like doing quests, you probably don't like to play computer role playing games, and then Starfield wouldn't appeal to you, but then you probably won't have read this far in this little article.

It has taken me more than 50 hours of playtime to get to the point where I'm starting to really enjoy Starfield. It's large, complex, and elaborate. You can invest less time in the game, but then you might not get as much out of it.

Starfield is a really nerdy game. The developers spent a lot of time thinking about what it might be like in a possible future where space travel is possible, and the game primarily appeals (I suspect) to people who are interested in this topic themselves.

But it also means that Starfield is the sort of computer game where the loading screens display messages like:

The Iron family of inorganic resources includes Alkanes, Tantalum, and Ytterbium.

So again, that sort of tells you whether you might be interested in this game or not.

Given the size and complexity of Starfield, it's hard for me to find enough time to really play it as it's meant to be played, for long stints of several hours or more at a time.

So check back in with me in another six months or so, when I'll probably have been playing Starfield for several hundred hours, and then maybe I'll have more to say.