Starfield: a thousand planets and not one journey

Starfield released on 6 September 2023 for Xbox Series and Windows, on the new Creation Engine 2. Press scores landed around 83–85, Steam reviews came out mixed, and on 7 April 2026 the game finally reached PlayStation 5, alongside a large free update and a new story add-on. Nearly three years on, the construction can be discussed calmly.

The main verb

A space game promises movement. Testing what it actually does is easy: look at which action you repeat most often.

In Starfield it is selecting a line in a menu. You open the system map, choose a planet, press a button — loading screen — you are in orbit. You choose a point on the surface — loading screen — you are standing on soil. You cannot lift off from one planet and land on another in a single motion. You cannot fly to the planet visible through your window. Between you and any point in the world there is always a menu.

Bethesda built a game about space in which space is an interface: not an expanse you cross, but a list you pick from.

This is not a complaint about convenience. It is the structural difference between having flown there and having chosen it. The entire sense of scale that space games exist for rests on the first, and only the second is available here.

A thousand planets

There are more than a thousand planets, generated procedurally. In practice this means surfaces assembled from prefabricated terrain chunks and identical structures: you land on the third planet and find the same abandoned mine with the same floor plan as on the first. Ten hours in you stop landing anywhere except story locations — and the game loses nothing.

The numbers work against themselves. A thousand identical places feel smaller than one well-made valley, and Starfield is the clearest demonstration of that in recent years.

What is done well

The ship builder. It is the best part of the game and one of the better construction tools anywhere: modules actually connect, the interior layout follows from the exterior, and mass, thrust and power distribution are computed honestly. People build tugs and freighters in it simply because doing so is interesting in itself.

Some quest lines — the Crimson Fleet, and the corporate Ryujin thread — are written noticeably above the studio's average, with real branches rather than a choice of reply. Inon Zur's score is the one thing everybody agrees on.

And the new game plus is woven into the plot in a genuinely interesting way. The trouble is that reaching it takes forty hours.

Why 6.5

Six and a half is the grade for a game with an excellent workshop, decent quests and a completely failed core. Everything that does not require movement is built to Bethesda's standard. Everything to do with travel — that is, the reason anyone picks up a space game at all — has been replaced by a list with a loading button. Patches added performance and a sixty-frame mode, add-ons added content, but no update can change a structure. This is not a bad game. It is a very expensive game built around the wrong verb.