Recent reviews by Scott

This is an interesting one, as while I'd recommend buying it, there's a lot of caveats attached to that:

1. The biggest... don't buy this if you've never played a Bethesda game before. If you've not got any experience with BGS games, I'd strongly recommend buying FO4 next time it's on sale and playing that for a few days. Ignore the plot and setting, what you'll really be looking for is the gameplay style - if you can look past the janky game engine, often uninspired and insipid writing and dialogue, and Bethesda's terrible attempt to make a console UI work on PC, then congratulations, Starfield might be something you can play and enjoy, but if not, don't shell out even more money for this, as it's all of that turned up to 11.

2. Performance. for such an old game engine, BGS can coax a surprising amount out of it, but Starfield still can't shake the fact that it looks like a distinctly last-gen game, but has the performance specs of a next-gen one. I have a liquid-cooled RTX 3090 - which despite being a couple of years old now still puts me distinctly on the right-hand side of the bell-curve when it comes to hardware specs - but my god, does it struggle. Bethesda, for the love of Talos, please let Gamebryo and its all it's Frankenstein descendants rest in peace! I appreciate that re-tooling your whole pipeline for a new engine is a monumental undertaking, but it simply has to happen, and for a company with pockets as deep as yours, it should be a priority.

3. Configuration. This goes hand-in-hand with the above, but really, we need to move past the bad old days of making INI tweaks to configure our settings - I mean come on, what year is this? 2003? I run on a triple-monitor setup, in 5760x1080. While I appreciate 16:3 is not exactly a common aspect ratio, Bethesda really do need to understand that we're moving on from the days where you could comfortably assume everyone is running at either 720p or 1080p, capped at 60Hz. We have high refresh rate displays, some of which actually work better without VSync. We have ultrawide displays. We have UHD displays. Where is the HDR support? What about DLSS? I shouldn't need to write custom INI files or mod my game to make any of these things work on any current-gen release from a major studio - even some indy titles are handling this better than Bethesda.

4. Originality. Or the lack of it. Starfield is claimed to be Bethesda's first original IP in over two decades. I just wish that meant it was a little more... original. It's a mash-up of sci-fi tropes from all directions... you've got Mass Effect, Firefly, No Man's Sky, The Expanse, Star Citizen, Starship Troopers and more all thrown into a big bucket, but there doesn't seem to have been much effort to curate and distill what came back out. The end result just feels pretty lazy and trope-heavy, and could definitely have benefited from some tighter focus on developing a story first, then building a world around it.

5. Depth. Unlike a lot of the negative reviews, I disagree here. Rather than being "wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle" Starfield does have depth, the problem is it's not everywhere, and finding it can be tricky when everything looks so samey. It only took a couple of hours for me to find the exploration boring, and the bizarre decision to force you to explore on foot and only loot what you can carry (unless you want to walk even more excruciatingly slowly back to your ship) makes it feel like I'm being punished for daring to find cool stuff out in the wilderness. It feels like even without vehicles, there had to be a possibility for compromise of some sort here... e.g. why can't I get one of the crew I left behind on the ship to fly it over to the abandoned base I found 2km away so I don't have to traipse back and forth like a pack mule? Conversely, some of the actual settlements feel more like cardboard cut-outs than real, living, breathing communities. The irritating thing here is that effort was made in some places, but not in others, leaving the game feeling half-baked and unsatisfying in places.

6. Hype. This one kind of ties back in to my first point, but I really do want to hammer it home to BGS that they need to dial it back a bit and take a little time to collectively extract their heads from their own rear orifices (yeah, this goes further than just The Todd). This ridiculous hype they've been building around their game for the past 5 years now was never going to end well for them. Expectations were being set that this would be some sort of competitor to Star Citizen in scope, scale, vision and experience. Just look at how well things are going with development for that game to see how that was going to work out. And the truth was always that Starfield wouldn't be capable of achieving even half of what Star Citizen's tech demo has so far, simply because of the engine they use - Creation Engine simply can't support that kind of seamless experience. The end result is inevitable then, lots of recriminations and mistrust that could have been entirely avoided.

In summary then, if you're a fan of other BGS games (warts and all) and love the idea of one set in a cheap knock-off of Firefly's 'Verse, then this is for you. If you're lucky enough to already own a powerful gaming rig, willing to fork out for an upgrade, or willing to run this game in potato mode while turning your PC into a space heater, then give it a spin. If you're patient enough to search for the hidden gems in this giant building-sized haystack of procedural content, then go for it. I personally tick all of those boxes, and this game, while hardly GOTY material when compared to the likes of Baldur's Gate 3, has enough to keep me coming back for one more session exploring the blackest sea.

Ignore the EULA storm in a teacup - it's a nonissue unless it can be proven that T2 are actually using the game to gather any of the data mentioned in it. Basically, upon acquiring publishing rights for the game, T2 Interactive changed the EULA to a standard boilerplate used for all of their games, which mentions all of the possible ways in which a modern game might end up acquiring personal data. It isn't relevant to those of us living in the EU anyway, as the GDPR means that their privacy policy trumps it when dealing with privacy issues - and the only data they can gather must be clearly tied to delivery of their services as publishers of the game or clear and explicit consent must be provided at the point of submission.

This game is AWESOME and doesn't deserve the heaps of negative reviews being given for what is actually a fairly standard license from a reasonably well-respected publishing house (they're certainly no EA). The developers are passionate about their game and clearly love the fan community.

For the Kim Jong Un in you...