So let's begin with the short version. This game is great. It's one of the best I've ever played, a true masterpiece. If you're into action narrative rpgs, if you love scifi like Mass Effect and Star Trek, it's a must play.
Basically, this the game that longtime fans always hoped and prayed Bethesda had in them. By now it's almost become a cliche in the gaming community to note that BGS games are 90 percent setting and 10 percent story. The world's are huge and detailed. The main story is often lackluster, although there are always a few nice treats among the side quests. Imagine, gamers said, if there was a BGS game that had that beautiful, detailed world AND a great story?
Well, Starfield is that game. Same incredible world as always only more, more detailed, more beautiful, just MORE. There are huge cities, space stations, underground dungeons, industrial facilities and yes, a lot of empty space, deserts, mountains, oceans, ice plains, forests, steaming jungles. Only now there's a great story to tie it all together.
Did I say story? I meant stories. As a choice and consequence rpg, there are multiple paths through this game with multiple possible outcomes and you can try all of them. And the faction quests are outstanding, and contain as much or more content by themselves as most entire full priced AAA games. Most people say the UC Vanguard questline is the best. I haven't done the others for role playing reasons, but I concur that's it's pretty great.
I can go down the line discussing the components that make up this game, and each is probably the best Bethesda has ever done.
1) Mechanics. There's a lot of depth in these systems and each one of them is polished. Regular combat, ship combat, crafting, outpost building, persuasion. The best thing about the game mechanics is that you can ignore them iif you want and it won't make that much difference to your experience. Except for combat. I doubt anyone is going to make a pacifist playthrough work here.
a) About combat specifically, I would say it's best not to start out as a melee specialist as I did. The gunplay is a strength of this game. Also, for my money, fight in first person mode. It's just a better experience as you don't have to worry as much about your third person avatar getting hung up on environmental objects.
b) I mostly ignore ship combat for the first thirty hours of the game. The UC quest does eventually require you to get better at ship combat, but if you ignore that quest you can get through the whole game without having to engage much with it.
c) Crafting, outpost building. Ignore these. I would have had to put points into the science tree, points I was finding other uses for.
d) Persuasion. It took me about 20 hours to figure out the persuasion minigame but once I learned it, put some points in to Persuasion, Diplomacy and Negotiation, and got a Corpoware suit with plus 5 Persuasion, I was rolling. This is a very viable skill. I even used it to talk the last boss out of the big fight at the end of the game.
2) Presentation. Overall, very good. It's definitely not as polished as a lot of linear AAA games, but so what?
a) Visuals, graphics, art direction, animations. Th art direction is derived from a lot of old science fiction paperback novel covers. I love that look, and anyone else who does will feel right at home in this universe. The graphics? Despite having an RTX 3050, my computer defaulted to low settings. (After a Geforce Driver update, I'm pleased to report that the game is looking a lot better than before. I finally understand what people are talking about when they say it's a good looking game.) Not that I care.
b) Music. Sweeping, orchestral and old fashioned. Sort of Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams.
c) Voice acting. The main characters like your companions are great. I chose Andreja as my character's romantic companion. Her voice acting and facial animation was pretty good, especially for a Bethesda game.
3) Story. The best thing about this game is the way everything comes together to tell the story. At the end of this game you've been exploring, fighting, persuading and trading for dozens of hours. There's an entire universe out there, full of people you've hated, sometimes loved. It's fitting that the ending should be about your relation to the universe. I won't say anything else because it's neat to discover on your own.
a) Quests. Among the quests, I want to mention a few standouts. There's this one near the end of the game where you're trapped in a facility that is oscillating between two parallel versions of itself; you get to switch between the two of them in gameplay just like A Crack in the Slap in Dishonored 2 or Effect and Cause in Titanfall 2. There's another more horror-ish one where you have to fight through a snowy, deserted city to fight horrible alien monsters who are threatening humanity. There's a mission aboard a luxury starliner where you have to get some codes from a corrupt bank executive. Those are just the one I've played that I remember off the top of my head right now. Plenty more
b) Characters. Bethesda still isn't classic era Bioware who did characters better than anyone, but they've done a good job in Starfield. As I said, my character romanced Andreja. Ultimately, Andreja died in my playthrough. Rather than save scumming and going back to save her, I let it stand. This got me a tragic loss added a bittersweet element to the galactic quest, making the whole thing better. I've done romance options in Fallout 4, and that game gave me now confidence in BGS's ability to pull something like that off. Andreja is a great companion. I think they got the pacing right. In other games you say something nice to a character, then you do it maybe five more times, and you give them some gifts, and then you unlock a sex scene. This doesn't feel like that at all. You have to travel and go on missions with her. At first she's polite, but very focused on the mission of Constellation. Gradually, she warms up to you. You become a trusted comrade, someone she's seen a lot of combat and action with. You start giving each other advice. At a certain point she starts confiding in you. She's a woman with a complicated past and secrets. She doesn't know what to do. If you help her, only then do you unlock her romance option. And after that, if you keep earning her trust you can commit to each other. She'll take you off to a remote spot on a planet somewhere and share a personal gift from her childhood. When I found out the nature of the gift, I was moved. And then, not long after that, she died.
In closing, I want to address something I heard repeated about this game a lot. The first 12 hours or so aren't so great.
Well, yes and no. BGS games are built on one foundational bedrock, Player Freedom. These games don't stop you from doing anything, even if you end up ensuring that you''re going to have a bad time. If you want to skip the main story, the faction quests and all the good side content in the cities to go mine Nickel on some godforsaken rock on the edge of the galaxy for 30 hours, the game won't stop you.
And let's say you're doing this while never puting skill points into Fitness or Boost so that you can't run anywhere without getting out of breath and you have no jetpack? That' doesn't sound like fun at all.
So, yes, this game could do a better job at getting noobies up to speed. All BGS games are like this. There are so many systems to learn that feeling comfortable with them just takes a long time. Like it took me about 20 hours to figure out that sometimes I landed too hard and took fall damage, which gave me a fracture, and that I had to use an Immobilizer to cure the fracture so I could run properly again. Things like that.
Anyway, that's what I have to say after my first 60 hour playthrough. I'm going to play some new game plus. I might add some addenda later.
Addendum: Okay, so I'm deep into a New Game plus playthrough. I am doing the Free Star and Ryujin questlines this time. I'm particularly enjoying Ryujin. Starting the game I'd tried to build a melee-stealth character. Well, that's a pretty difficult build to make work in this game, particularly early on. It was so bad that I wondered why they even bothered to put these skills in the game.
As it turns out, Ryujin's cyberpunk corporate espionage quests are where practically all the stealth content lives in this game. (I still haven't found a way to make melee actually worth using yet.) It was such a revelation to me when I found I could use Diplomacy and Manipulation out of the Scanner to control enemies. When you have them under control from one of your social skills, they don't detect you and you can safely incapacitate them with an EM weapon. 80 hours in and this game is still showing me new ways to play. Incredible.
Addendum 2: About 91 hours player. I can say I've done all of the faction quests, at least the major factions. On the internal scale of the game I would say UC is A, the Constellation/Main story is B+, with Ryujin and Free Star as B or B-.
Free Star is the weakest from a story perspective, but it does have some good FPS action, especially near the end.
SOME ADVICE FOR NEW PLAYERS:
1) A lot of people are complaining about the encumbrance system. Here's something it took me about 25 hours to figure out. This game is not Fallout 4. In that game it made a lot of sense to build up a huge junk collection, because you could use it for crafting. YOu could craft all sorts of stuff.
In Starfield crafting is really a late game thing. If you build up a huge pile of crafting materials, you'll find it's pretty much useless until level 20 or so. You need to invest skills in the science tree before you can build anything good. It's so easy to become encumbered at the beginning of the game because the game designers dont' actually want you to play that way. Also, there's literally no penalty for ignoring crafting entirely. The weapons you find are more than good enough to carry you through the whole game.
And that carrying around weapons and armor to sell to merchants and make money? Not worth it. You'll get plenty of money just as rewards from quests and picking stuff up in the environment. You won't have to buy too much stuff at first.
Also DO NOT CARRY FOOD IN YOUR INVENTORY. Pick it up and eat it right away if you must but the benefit is usually too small to bother. Of course, drugs/alcohol that give specific situational bonuses are an exception to this.
Remember that you can use your companion as a pack mule.
2) Stay with the main/Constellation story, at least at first. When I first started I was playing a melee stealth build, which frankly sucked. I was hopeless in combat. Thankfully, Sarah was there to kill all the bad guys for me. Plus you get infinite storage and a bed to sleep in.
Also it's the best XP you can get early on in the game so you'll level up pretty quick.
3) No matter what you do, put a point into your Boost pack skill ASAP. The boost pack is unusable before that and planetary exploration is a chore without it.
4) IMHO combat is much better and smoother in first person because you don't have to deal with the third person avatar clipping into the environment. Do your fights in that camera mode.
5) I recommend spending a skill point on Rifles as soon as you can and picking up a Maelstrom. This gun is ubiquitous in this universe and so is it's ammo. It will carry you through plenty of early game content and by then you'll have plenty of other choices.
5.0