5/5 ★ – chickensquasher's review of Starfield.

For years I’ve been satisfied with modern RPGs. They gave me a story to follow, characters to fall in love with and a rich world to explore. But in my opinion these aren’t true Role Playing Games. Each of these games give you a single perspective. 2018’s God of War lets you see from a perspective of a Father trying to get his son ready for adulthood. Mass Effect lets you be a Galactic FBI agent, helping the Government save the Universe. Even table top games give you a narrow perspective due to how the GM leads you through the world. For me, what I truly believe what an RPG can do is give you the ability to say “no thank you” to whatever narrative the game throws at you, and decide to just live. Whether it be a hobo living out on the streets with no money to your name, or someone who wants to own a business and let income passively fill your pockets. Complete freedom with no incentive to complete some grand quest to save the world or a loved one but still have the option to do it. That is the type of RPG experience I want. Has Starfield accomplished this? Surprisingly, it’s very close. The amount of roles you play in this game is staggering. I can be a farmer, a miner, a Vigilante, I can get into an arms dealer business, or become a space trucker. The possibilities are not endless, but they are vast.. To be fair, I haven’t experienced everything yet, and I don’t know if I ever will. In my current play-through I’m a wannabe Diplomat that came from a loving family that, by some random bad luck, got turned into a miner. I mine an artifact that gives me visions and all of a sudden I get thrust into a story about exploring the galaxy and discovering what these artifacts are supposed to be. In this playthrough I go along with this path and start the main quest where I learned to negotiate my way out of any situation and at the same time became a badass sword fighting ninja. However, in another playthrough, I start out the same way except I’m a wannabe Professor with a bounty on my head. I still find the same artifact but when the main quest comes knocking I say, “hm, give me some time to think about it” and I just blow them off and try to live a peaceful life, scanning rocks and observing the local fauna of the planet I’m on, as well as checking out some of the unique features that each planet has. Anything to stay out of trouble and keep a low profile. And the game allows it and has a skill tree for it. I can get better resources from animals I scan, I can increase the range of my scanner, I can learn to utilize my scanner on my ship to find traits and features of the planet without even landing on it. If I want to start a life in a certain spot I can build a civilian outpost and live the quiet life I’ve always wanted. I have to be careful though, because I am wanted and bounty hunters will come for me every once in a while, which forces me to dabble in either ship customization or puts me on a path to build better outpost defenses, making me feel like one of those hermits out in the woods that that has a sign “Warning! Private Property. Trespassers will be shot!” A twitch streamer I follow wanted to live the life of Captain Malcom Reynolds from theTV series Firefly. And he did. He got his ship, started building his crew, and started taking any odd jobs just so he can make enough to get by, and the skill tree lets him progress in that front as well. He can increase the amount of crew members he has, he can increase the health of those that follow him out into gun fights, and he can learn to make new upgrades for his ship. Maybe you want more of a Mr. and Mrs. Smith sort of life? Well, get far enough in the main story and you might find yourself a life partner you can be with and even have a marriage ceremony, and together, work undercover for the government to bring a criminal organization down. Heck, why not let that undercover work be the reason you two get married in the first place? You can bond over screwing criminals over, and when that’s done, you can take contracts together and kill all the lowlifes threatening innocent lives across the galaxy. The universe is your oyster when you have a loved one by your side. Let’s say you’re not into role playing, is this game still fun? It can be, but to be honest it lacks the depth of most RPGs in terms of mechanics and abilities. Instead it focuses more on the breadth of things. With that said, the skill tree is still pretty big with a lot of variety, but from what it looks like each skill will only take you so far by itself. It’s hard for me to say if any of them combine into something that completely alters the game for players, though, because I’m not playing to experiment with my abilities, I’m playing to roleplay, to live a life I could never live otherwise. I know people will be remiss if I don’t mention the traversal. And yes, if you’re a gamer who needs a mini map to get around town then this game is absolutely not for you, and this game will be completely unplayable as well since there is no mini map. There is a map, but it doesn’t detail all of the terrain. It just shows you all of the stars and planets with location markers on each of them. There is an area map for where you are on the planet, but there is no detail to it other than locations you can fast travel to. Which is what I think the game tries to encourage you to get used to: fast travel. The universe is so vast that it would become such a chore to traverse without it. Here’s a brief overview of what would happen if you didn’t fast travel: you walk to your ship, open the hatch, walk to the captain’s seat, turn on the engine, fly to space, select a star to warp to, select a planet to warp to, wait 1 minute and wonder why you’re not warping, you remember it’s because you need to reroute power to your grav-drives, wait for security to scan you after you warp, open the map and find a place to land, and then finally land. And there’s still a couple things to do after that before you actually start traversing! I’ll be honest though. I kind of enjoy it. There’s this fun sense of accomplishment you get when you finally land on a new undiscovered planet. But I get how it can be an absolute slog of an experience for others. Thankfully the game puts shortcuts for everything so you don’t have to go through all of that, you can do as little or as much as you like. Just don’t forget to undock from the space station/ship, because for some reason fast travel does not work when you are docked at a station or if you are deep within a cave or mine. There’s a lot I’m not mentioning, like ship building , base building, crafting, and combat. As I mentioned, though, I’m 202 hours in and I have barely touched any of that. Those things are just so far away from what I’m role playing as that it doesn’t even cross my mind. So as much as I’d like to share my thoughts on those mechanics, I really can’t because I’ve never experienced it. Which, to me, is a testament in and of itself of how deep you can role play with this game. It’s not for everyone, but for me, it’s going to be really hard for me to play anything else for the next few months.