Plenty of space — Impressions: Starfields sheer scale is already giving me vertigo Hundreds of planets, hundreds of quests, but is there anything worth seeing?

Kyle Orland – Aug 31, 2023 4:00 pm UTC EnlargeBethesda | Aurich Lawson reader comments 205 with Game detailsDeveloper: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Platform: Windows (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S
Release Date: Sept. 6, 2023 (Aug. 31 early access)
ESRB Rating: M for Mature
Price: $70 (included with Microsoft Game Pass)
Links: Amazon | Steam | Official WebsiteThere’s a quote from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxythat Ive been thinking about a lot lately. Space is big, he writes. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Starfield may as well put this quote on the cover page of its design document. The deafening prerelease hype for the game emphasizes its inclusion of over 1,000 planets, across hundreds of realistically rendered star systems throughout the galaxy. That promotion has also focused on just how much stuff there is to do across those myriad planets; Bethesda Head of Publishing Pete Hines said in a recent interview with IGN that hes spent 150160 hours in the game and hasnt even come close to seeing everything.

After a few dozen hours with a prerelease version of Starfield, Im comfortable saying that Hines isnt being hyperbolic. One look at the games intricate star map and the myriad star systems you can reach with a series of warp-speed jumps is enough to give you vertigo. Enlarge / Just a small corner of Starfield’s massive star map.

If you can focus on Starfields core story questline, which focuses on a collection of mysterious, vision-granting Artifacts strewn across the galaxy, you may well be able to reach the ending of the game in a reasonable amount of time. If youre anything like me, though, youll find yourself quickly sidetracked by a cornucopia of optional missions that start to grow almost fractally, with each new quest flowing into offers of multiple further quests along the way. Advertisement

Many of these missions are one-off simple tasks that can be completed in short order (an inordinate number of Starfield NPCs have been stiffed by some no-show pilot or another). But many more are the start of full-fledged careers, each with a seemingly never-ending series of errands that will send you bouncing back and forth between far-flung planetary systems.

Within a few hours of starting the game, I found myself engaged as a pilot in the Vanguard Navy, working as a (semi-unwilling) undercover agent for a System Defense group and taking on freelance bounty-hunting jobs. And thats all in between answering distress calls, doing cargo runs, tracking down an electrical drain in a subterranean community, and countless other odd jobs.

The bigness of Starfield (and of space in general) isnt up for debate. The key question, as it is in the Hitchhikers Guide books, is how to go about finding something interesting to do in all that space. And on that score, thus far, Starfield has been more of a mixed bag. 1,000 planets and not much on

Some expectation-setting is important here. Just because Starfield boasts over 1,000 planets, dont go in thinking youre getting 1,000 fully realized, Skyrim-level civilizations unto themselves. First off, a lot of the planets are gas giants that you can explore from orbit but not land on (though its not clear if those even count in Bethesdas 1,000-plus number). But even for the rocky planets you can land on, a random off the beaten path sampling seems more likely to yield a large, mostly barren landscape than a world bursting with life. Even good-old Earth is subject to this rule, as the planet was made desolate years before the game’s events by the environmental catastrophe that first sent humans to the stars.

To be fair, you can get lucky and pick a random location full of lush vegetation and colorful fauna. I stumbled on one full of large, grazing beasts alongside carnivorous dinosaurs that wouldnt look out of place in a natural history museum diorama. Page: 1 2 3 4 Next → reader comments 205 with Kyle Orland Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. Advertisement Promoted Comments Nauls The general lack of things to do on the myriad of planets doesnt surprise me. Its a hard, if not impossible, void to fill, and Im not sure why developers even try to set that bar for themselves. Even No Mans Sky, which has added quite a bit of content to its planets over the years, still suffers from becoming repetitive after a relatively short amount of time.

For Starfield, Ive always set my expectations higher for the core planets, which are really where Bethesdas talent for crafting engrossing RPG environments should shine. If Starfield has at least the same breadth and depth of hand-crafted detailed environments and questlines that weve come to expect from a Skyrim or Fallout game, then Im happy. The addition of a 1000-planet galaxy is just icing at that point, in my opinion. August 31, 2023 at 4:27 pm gaballard Between Starfield, Elite Dangerous, and No Mans Sky, were done with the open world space game with thousands of planets with not much to do on each genre for a while, right? August 31, 2023 at 5:00 pm Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Next story → Related Stories Today on Ars