To begin with, I’ll start my review by stating that the new difficulty setting update, along with the exploration vehicle update, has significantly altered much of the game experience. For those who didn’t enjoy the game or have always struggled to appreciate Bethesda’s games, I don’t think these updates provide a reason to start playing. The game still carries many of its major flaws. While mods can mitigate some of these issues, they can’t completely eliminate them. I’ll discuss what those flaws are and which ones have been addressed since the game’s release.

Firstly, I want to start by saying that Starfield’s game structure is unlike any other Bethesda game. The greatest strength of every Bethesda game is its “open world,” which is filled with intricately designed, interesting quests, engaging environmental storytelling, and excellent worldbuilding elements. We explore these open worlds freely with our character, shaping the world in our own way to some extent. In these games, the open world and the quests and environmental storytelling that fill it are at the core of the experience. However, Starfield is not an “open world” game by its nature, but rather an “open universe” game. Because of this, the design principle of providing a single world filled with interesting stories wasn’t possible. Instead, they opted for a system of multiple star clusters, where each star system contains different environments with unique attributes. Within these systems, when you visit a cataloged location (planets), small, randomly generated open worldlets are created, filled with points of interest (POIs) that are also randomly generated. Unfortunately, this system works terribly. On almost every planet I landed on, I encountered the same cryolab with the same lore; every corner of the building was identical. Nearly every abandoned location had the same layout and enemy types, and each POI category had completely identical structures. For instance, if a cryolab is a POI in an ice biome, there’s only one cryolab POI. Or if an abandoned factory is in question, the interior design is completely the same. These identical POIs kill the sense of discovery in the game. Although I was able to partially fix this with a few mods, the most important issue Starfield urgently needs to address is these POIs. I mentioned the open universe system earlier; in an open universe, star systems contain different cataloged planets within them. The beauty of the classic open world formula is that you encounter events naturally as you travel, but Bethesda’s open universe model has a completely fragmented travel system. Moving from one star system to another triggers a loading screen, landing on a planet in that star system triggers another loading screen, and during the parts of travel without loading screens, we usually watch cutscenes (I wish there were no loading screens and all travel was in cutscenes). This diminishes the sense of mystery when we finally come across places worth exploring because even when we stumble upon a handcrafted quest on the map, we don’t get the satisfaction of traveling there naturally—we just click on our ship and spawn right in front of the area to be explored. Imagine if the exploration system in Skyrim only involved clicking on icons to travel to locations. The joy of discovering a cave, walking the path, stumbling upon blood trails on the ground, and following them to the entrance wouldn’t exist. If Skyrim's open-world exploration system had been like Starfield’s, you’d find a note on the ground in the main city saying, “Go to the cave in the east,” and you’d click on it to travel to the cave’s entrance via a loading screen. This is exactly why Starfield fails—it has an exploration system that works just like this example. The player is faced with an open universe that cannot be explored smoothly and naturally.

Bethesda games don’t offer a deeply immersive RPG experience, nor do they provide a fully action-oriented RPG feel like CDPR games; they fall somewhere between the RPG and action RPG genres. Bethesda’s biggest strength has always been blending action and RPG elements seamlessly. So, it’s not wrong to expect both a good RPG experience and a solid real-time FPS/TPS combat experience from Bethesda. The RPG depth that became increasingly simplified with Skyrim and Fallout 4 has now transformed into something completely different with Starfield. Starfield’s skill system pushes the player in a specific direction—if you love planet exploration, it gives you challenges to improve your planet exploration perks, allowing you to enhance your skills in this area. Although the skill system encourages players to pursue their desired path, the game is unfortunately not a deep RPG. It’s impossible to solve problems by becoming a scientist or logistics expert, finding alternative routes, or playing as a diplomat and resolving the game peacefully. Although there are some persuasion options, regardless of your build, the game eventually pushes you into a John Wick-like path where you must rely on your weapons. If you’ve built a character who is a planet biome researcher, you can’t convey this through dialogue to solve problems. Similarly, if you’re a logistics master, the game doesn’t offer mechanical solutions designed for such a character. No matter your role, the game doesn’t provide mechanical depth for role-playing. Even if you’re a scientist, there’s little opportunity to express this through dialogue. If you’re a space trader, you can improve your trading perk to buy goods cheaper and sell them at higher prices, but there’s no path designed for being a space trader. Essentially, you turn into a space John Wick with some additional RPG elements. You’re John Wick, but with space trader perks, or John Wick with ecologist perks, and only rarely do these elements mechanically support your solutions. In the end, whether you’re a scientist or a logistics master, the majority of what you do is shoot and raid raider bases. You can avoid combat entirely, just build bases, or focus solely on planet exploration; the game doesn’t force you into combat. But if you deviate even slightly from your path, you’ll inevitably encounter quests or activities where the only solution is to kill raiders with your gun. This is because, as I mentioned, the game’s design principles aren’t tailored to allow you to solve problems with different roles and finish the game through different paths. Frankly, Starfield, despite having a skill tree that encourages role-playing, is one of the weakest RPGs I’ve seen in terms of mechanics. I don’t recall ever experiencing a game where the skill tree is so RPG-friendly, but the design principles are so far from RPG mechanics.

Another significant feature of Starfield is its base-building and crafting system. While I really enjoy building bases in the game, especially at launch, even simple tasks like connecting miners to storage units were infuriating. Connecting materials from different planets via logistics was equally difficult. Aside from those issues, crafting in the game and building and managing a base is very enjoyable. It’s especially satisfying to establish bases on different planets and link their logistics. However, after a while, you get the feeling that you’re building these bases for nothing because reaching the point where you can produce enough iron to sell it to other factions takes at least 10 to 20 hours. When you finally mine 5000 units of iron and sell it at Strauss Shipyard, you only earn 15,000 credits. That’s such a laughable amount of money that progressing by raiding raiders’ bases and selling their armor is much more profitable than building a base. In other words, the game’s economic system is unbalanced. Mining and base-building are very labor-intensive, and their only real benefit is providing raw materials when researching new items in the research lab or producing something in the construction lab.