So, I finally played Starfield. For 85 hours, no less. And honestly, just about everything I had read or heard about the game prior to playing turned out to be true.
I think Starfield is both an evolution of Bethesda’s core game design and a significant downgrade from the studio’s established open world structure. In short, I think it’s a bit of a mess — but it’s a mess that’s kept me coming back for weeks on end.
But before I start pulling from the far reaches of my objective marker-addled brain, a quick background check…
There was a time, many years ago now, when Bethesda’s RPGs changed my perspective of what a video game could be. It started with Oblivion, a landmark title that introduced me to freeform adventure, and it continued through Fallout 3 and then, of course, Skyrim.
Even though they ran like absolute sh*t on PS3, I had nothing but love for these games. I used to get utterly lost in them, and it got to a point where they became the main staple of my gaming diet. I’d find myself going back to them time and time and time again.
In fact, I got so obsessed with Skyrim in particular that, for the first time in my life, I veered away from console gaming and rebuilt the family PC so I could experience the glory of user-created mods.
God only knows how many hours I put into those games. Hell, I still get the urge to return to Skyrim here in 2026 — it’s like a home away from home.
It’s fair to say, then, that I’ve been a big Bethesda fan for a hefty chunk of my life. I even pumped hundreds of hours into Fallout 4; it never quite enveloped me like its predecessor did, but I still struggled to tear myself away from its eternally moreish gameplay loop.
My faith in Bethesda has eroded since then, however — as I imagine it has for many of you reading this. I couldn’t even begin to enjoy Fallout 76, and the wait for a new Elder Scrolls title has been nothing short of absurd.
And outside of the games, Bethesda has been making highly questionable decisions for years. The introduction of the Creation Club — a way to effectively monetise mods — soured my perspective considerably. The re-releases, complete with the same bugs, glitches, and performance issues as their source material, drove another nail in the company’s coffin.
Which brings us to Starfield. When I first heard that Todd and the gang were working on a sci-fi game, I was interested, but as mentioned, my opinion of the once-lauded studio had sunk so low that I couldn’t muster up any real excitement.
It was going to be the same engine; the same old issues that I could somehow stomach as a teenager, but had lost all patience for as an adult. I watched and waited as Starfield launched a couple of years back on Xbox and PC.
The reviews were reasonably strong, but it took less than a day for players to start ripping the game apart. It was heavily criticised for… well, basically just being very, very boring.
I was more than happy to wait for it to come to PS5, and the port finally happened last month. The promise of a much improved Starfield was laid out before me, and for a little while, I actually felt some degree of hype.
It was almost reminiscent of those halcyon days — taking my first steps into a whole new world of Bethesda-style discovery. What a thrill.
And then I actually played the thing and my expectations were brought back down to earth with a dull thud. Starfield immediately feels like a last-gen game, and a genuine relic of the past from a technical and structure standpoint.
(I should note that I had been dipping back into Cyberpunk 2077 before this to test out its new PS5 Pro support. Needless to say, Starfield was a mind-blowing downgrade.)
I got about five hours in before the crashes started happening. It’s 2026 and Bethesda’s games are still crashing. They still don’t ****ing work. I came close to hitting delete.
But I had seen just enough to warrant an extra dose of patience. Bethesda said it was working on a PS5-specific fix, and so Starfield was put on hold yet again.
Even though the number of load screens beggared belief, the character animations were abysmal, and the procedurally-generated planets were jarringly soulless, Starfield had already wiggled its way into my grey matter within the few hours that I’d managed to play.
Playing Bethesda games is like being in a toxic relationship. You know the journey is going to be fraught with disappointment and despair, but there’s a special something that calls you back, often against your better judgement.
Starfield still has that Bethesda magic. There’s an inherent, moreish quality to its games that’s still present here; a feeling that you exist in a living, breathing world. Where you’re just one moving part of a bigger picture.
It might sound mad, but no one accomplishes this sense of place quite like Bethesda. Have better open worlds been made since the company’s glory days? Absolutely, both on an artistic and technical level. But in terms of immersion, there’s just something about the developer’s commitment to times, calendars, random events, and NPC routines that solidifies the illusion.
Anyway, Bethesda’s promised patches arrived and Starfield mostly works now. And by that, I mean I could spend close to 100 hours in its intergalactic setting without it crashing every ten minutes. It does still crash, mind, and the frame rate is consistently dog****, but I stuck with it because I’m evidently insane.
I just had to see what Bethesda was going for with Starfield. What’s the hook? What’s the vision?
Prior to this article, and prior to the game’s release on PS5, I wrote a feature about the general perception of Starfield, satisfyingly titled ‘Does Starfield Suck?’. It questioned the often overwhelmingly negative feedback I’d witnessed over the years, aimed squarely at the sci-fi RPG.
In that feature, I admitted to an unshakeable urge to try the game for myself — to see if it did indeed suck, even when approached by someone who has, historically, exhibited a high tolerance for Bethesda’s nonsense.
