After so many years of build up, and then being wrapped up in Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda, it’s fair to say that Starfield was a little bit controversial when it launched in late 2023. Purely from a gameplay perspective, the expectations for this spacefaring cousin to Fallout and The Elder Scrolls were possibly a bit too much for it to live up to. But times change, and with Starfield now out on PlayStation 5, some major updates and expansions added to the mix, it’s possible that this game can compare more favourably to its relatives.
Of course, now in 2026, reality has set in. You’re more likely to head into Starfield on PS5 and know exactly what you’re getting. It’s essentially Fallout in space and, despite some failings in certain areas, Starfield really isn’t that bad in context.
The game begins with you as a miner. That doesn’t sound that cool, but it’s space mining that’s done with a laser whilst wearing a spacesuit, so it is pretty cool actually. Whilst mining you find a mysterious artifact and are suddenly propelled into a galaxy spanning quest to discover what it is, why it is, and where others are. This seems pretty standard but I have to say the main story of the game takes some surprising risks. It feeds into and then canonises New Game +, which is incredibly interesting.
The story’s delivery, though, is fairly flat. Actual cutscenes are typically absent, instead leaving conversations where you stare at a person’s uncannily animated face as they gab away at you. As futuristic as the setting is, it still manages to feel dated when you’re talking to people. Bethesda’s technology and style is in serious need of updating – the same way that Horizon: Forbidden West improved over Zero Dawn – with more camera angles, more dynamic animations, more convincing facial expressions.
A huge part of the space fantasy is blasting off into the void, and there’s a great variety and flexibility to the ships you can acquire and customise. You don’t just have to buy them, but can steal them and pay the registration fee. I found a legendary ship called the Razorleaf which, twenty hours later, I’m still using as the basis for my vessel. The ship building system is remarkably in depth and, frankly, way beyond what I had expected before the game’s original release – I just thought you’d be able to buy ships and upgrade the equipment, not have a system for constructing an entire ship yourself.
The actual experience of being in space is… good enough. Ship handling is good and I especially enjoy balancing your power between the weapons, shields, engines, etc. in combat. Prior to the Free Lanes update, actual space exploration was muted by the loading screens to get between systems and even planets within a system. Now you can actually travel between locations within a system, or activate the autopilot and go do stuff on your ship. It’s an improvement, but it’s obviously slower and a bit limited compared to travelling around in native space games like Freelancer or Elite Dangerous.
When you leave the free lanes, there’s a thinly disguised loading screen that loads the planet in properly, along with all the asteroids that were nowhere to be seen a moment ago. Ultimately, whether I use the free lanes or revert back to fast travel and loading screens depends on whether I’m willing to wait and/or be distracted by something else along the way. I’m glad it’s there and it’s a bit of an improvement, but it’s a bandaid for the way the Creation Engine works, and there’s no way to fix that for this game.
Strangely, there is no active economy in this game. Everything sells for the same price everywhere, so you can’t buy low and then sell high elsewhere to play as a trader. You can mine asteroids, but it’s not lucrative at all, and it’s better to set up outposts on planets to gather resources and ultimately manufacture stuff for sale if you want to. It’s far quicker to just shoot baddies and sell their weapons afterwards though. So trading is out, but bounty hunting, space policing, and piracy are all in, even with their own quest lines in some cases. These are all cool, but again come with concessions to fit them into the game’s engine. When you’re hunting bounties that are wanted alive, for example, you knock them out with an Electromagnetic Weapon and then the mission is immediately complete. You can just wander off, leaving them there, and someone will come along and collect them, which is silly.
If a life of crime is for you, you can threaten ships into giving you their cargo, or blow up their engines and then board them. You can, as mentioned, also steal their ships and sell them on, though the cost of registration is absurd, usually eating up enough of the actual price of the ship to not be worth stealing it in the first place. And once you do sell it, all the miscellaneous rubbish that was on it will be stuffed into your ship, forcing you to slowly go and sell it all for a credit or two at a time to free up the space it takes up.
Speaking of which, the sheer number of resources you inadvertently collect has really reached stupid levels, especially since you have to sift through vast lists of miscellaneous useless rubbish to find the good stuff that you want. It got so bad that I took all of my resources – that’s about 1800lb of stuff while my carry capacity was about 200lb – and stuck them all in a bottomless storage box in the basement of the Lodge that’s surrounded by crafting benches. Now I just go there, take everything out of the storage, do my researching and crafting, then shove it all back. You can have linked storage boxes between your Outposts, but I’d much rather have this on my ship, given the sheer amount of clutter and rubbish.
Also, companions talk too much. While you’d expect the occasional personal conversation with your adventuring buddy to occur, tightening the bonds between you, I’ve had multiple characters in Starfield that have offered these conversations back-to-back. They get super pushy about it too, nagging you until you talk to them. They also won’t shut up when you’re overburdened and generally say the same handful of voice lines ad nauseum. Andreja in particular always seemed to be a downer, constantly complaining about things.
I really feels that for every positive in Starfield there’s a negative, and yet I can’t stop playing it. It dragged me away from Crimson Desert and I’ve sunk around 40 hours in over the past week. There’s some exceptionally enjoyable sequences and they aren’t always a key part of the main story. My first fight in zero gravity on board an abandoned space station casino that was taken over by Spacers was a highlight, along with every other battle in zero-G. Boarding enemy ships is novel as well, so I do it even when I don’t need to, just because being able to target and disable specific systems is fantastic.
There have been two DLCs to add new regions and storylines, alongside some major free patches. You can look in the options for a large selection of gameplay changes for you to pick from, making things slightly easier for the trade off of earning slightly less XP, or harder to earn more. Personally I recommend giving yourself some more inventory space because there are far too many nonsense resources in this game. I also highly recommend exploring the Creations, which is where all the paid mods are, alongside some free ones that can fix parts of the game that you don’t like. There’s also a quick free quest from Bethesda that’s a Doom crossover and gives you a super shotgun, the doomslayer armour, and a giant sword.
