The first thing that I’d imagine most people are wondering about in regards to Starfield is how much the game feels like a traditional Bethesda produced RPG? Stripping away the new setting, story, and characters, I’d say that if you’ve enjoyed and/or are familiar with titles like Skyrim or Fallout 4, you’ll absolutely see connections between those games and Starfield. Mechanically, it doesn’t feel too dissimilar to Bethesda’s prior “modern” projects, but I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. What you’re left with in Starfield is a tried and true approach to RPG storytelling and open world shenanigans, allowing you to interact with multiple NPCs across multiple locations, all while freely exploring huge spaces, and adhering to the in-game rules or chucking those straight out the window in an attempt to become an agent of chaos within the game.
Considering the amount of development time and money it’d take to blow out each of the multiple planets featured with interesting and unique content with zero limitations, I think Bethesda’s more focused approach works fine. You still have tons to do and see, and you’ll have a hard time running out of exploration options across 100+ hours of gameplay.
On ground combat is a little more, well, grounded. It also doesn’t feel too dissimilar to the shooting in Fallout, minus the VATS system. I think the shooting feels a tad bit tighter and more impactful overall than Fallout, but enemy A.I. is virtually non-existent at times, so unless you’re encountering a foe that clocks in at multiple levels above you, you’ll likely breeze through most shootouts. There’s a solid variety of guns, featuring laser weapons, ballistics, explosives, and some grenade variants. The gravity of a location does come into play a little bit, so you’ll be executing some pretty impressive leaps when you’re in a low gravity environment, but you’ll also quickly gain access to a boost pack that’ll let you make limited jumps regardless of where you’re at.
On the performance side of things, my time with Starfield on an Xbox Series X was mostly fine. As expected, I did run into a few bugs, some graphical issues like character faces or bodies not fully loading in, leading to some monstrous looking dialogue moments. The frame rate does okay at 30 frames per second, but I did encounter moments of slowdown that seemed mostly tied to environmental effects like rain, which caused some noticeable hiccups here and there. I also don’t think the game plays well with the Quick Resume feature on Xbox, when I’d come back to the game at times there’d be a good 30 seconds or so of extreme slowdown before everything would go back to normal, so I’d advise you to maybe limit the use of that function until it’s hopefully patched.
Note: Bethesda Softworks provided us with a Starfield Xbox Series X|S code for review purposes.
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