Talking Point: After Almost Two Years, How Do You Feel About Xbox's Starfield In 2025?

To be honest I had completely forgotten it existed.

I can't speak much on Starfield because I didn't play much of it. But from the 2 hours and 46 minutes I played... eeehhh 🤷

Tried to get into it, but for some reason just couldn't. Sunk a fair few hours into it, but just didn't click with me

I stopped playing it after playing a quest I really didn't enjoy. The one where you are stuck between 2 realities swapping between them. I can't remember much else about the game.

I forgot about it and moved on.

Got bored really quickly and never finished it. I even forgot where I stopped. I don't plan on restarting or continuing.

I thought the combat was easily the best I've experienced so far from the developer,even the ship combat was a lot of fun
The music was of the usual high standard and the sound was great too
The visual presentation was quite stunning in most instances albeit a little rough in others
Personally I had a really fun time with the game at launch

I still love it. I was looking for some creative Bethesda quests in a space setting, and that is what I got. So I was very happy.

I was not expecting No Man’s Sky type exploration plus an RPG. I think it was kind of marketed that way, and that led to some understandable disappointment for people. The game also had a very uncomfortable start-new systems are not introduced well, and the first hours of the game are a real slog.

However: once I got past all that, it was a great space adventure. One of my favorites of 2023.

I still never played it but it was really never on my radar as I don't have time for these large games. The deep dive they did on this after the showcase really got me interested in it but again, no time for games this big unfortunately

Put it this way - I'm no longer as hyped for TES 6....And we're talking miles 🙄

Loved it but once I 100% the base game its been hard to come back. I bought the DLC but did not try it. I will wait for the next DLC and do them both. The game sucks you in and I wanted to play some others. I am playing Expedition 33 now and it's awesome

I was really looking forward to it, but got turned off by the whole AI generated planet thing. Played a little bit, but didn’t stick. I wanted to love it. Maybe I’ll try again..

I subbed to GP specifically to play it... And then asked for a refund in a day or two.

Last Bethesda game I enjoyed was Oblivion or Fallout 3 whichever of those was the more "new" one.

Starfields greatest achievement was making people concerned for TES 6 since Bethesda have fallen a long way with Todd Howard believing his own hype.

I tried multiple times to get into it and it just seemed unfinished. But, I'm sure when it comes out for the PS5, it will be a perfect 10.

If anyone else had made something so bug filled, glitch riddled and utterly broken they’d have been torn to shreds. There are glitch compilation videos hours long on YouTube highlighting problems with everything from basic movement to combat to pathing ai to NPC animations to dialogue bugs to general framerate performance issues to falling through the ground to shooting inexplicably off into orbit to various other game breaking, progression halting bugs.

Starfield is Mind’s Eye in space, but because Bethesda made it it gets a free pass. Bad coding is bad coding; nail Bethesda to the wall like every other lousy developer.

It's boring with cringe 2023 dialogue and the characters look horrible. The entire galaxy is a current-day US city in space with cowboys, pirates, corpos and starbucks, but without aliens or anything interesting. It's hard to get invested or immersed in, and most of the other content and exploration is procedurally generated so you know you're wasting your time.

It's a big disappointment for me since it's the first game I bought at full price in 10 years, and I also bought the limited edition headset and controller - which I recently sold.

Best game of the generation. An amazing sandbox for actual role playing. So much atmosphere, detail and weird stuff to discover.

It does take investment and patience and most importantly: personal creativity for role play. Not recommended for people who just want to play the main story and cross it off their backlog. Or for people who want an emotional narrative-driven game.

I honestly think it’s underrated. No it’s not a masterpiece but it’s far from being the joke that many make it out to be (and I suspect many of those people haven’t even touched the game).

Well I liked it. Put in about 80 hours which was enough for me. Had plenty of fun with it but it hasn't stuck in my mind like, say, Fallout 3 has over the years.

Never played it, probably never going to. 76 was so awful it confirmed that.

I love the game, I do wish Bethesda a talky supported it more. Like not even DLC just some nice updates, I'd take the survival eleme to they scrapped I favour if "mainstream appeal" like the ships using fuel. I suspect those untouched worlds and crashed ships make more sense when you need to scavenge fuel

"Empty" + "loading screens" are the two main things I took away from Starfield. I started off picking up side quests and factions missions, but in the end I just mainlined the main story and has to force myself to finish it. Haven't thought about it once since then.

The biggest missed opportunity of Bethesda's history. It feels like someone upstairs (microsoft?) Decided to force the "thousands of planets " thing, and it ruined the entire game. The main questline was actually quite decent, but the side content was too samey. The game as a whole was a frustrating mix of very good ideas and incredibly puzzling decisions. Certainly makes me worry for ES6.

I love Starfield. I have replayed it a couple times now after my initial barrage of 4 playthroughs. My 2023 goty and an all around great game.

I would like to see an update or dlc dedicated to base building/mining. That seemed like it was so close to being really fun. There could be a good story around building up your own space empire.

I still play Fallout 4 once in while, usually when between games. I start a new game of Skyrim at least once a year. I just played Oblivion Remaster to completion after vowing over a decade ago to never slog through it again. I love Bethesda games.
I bought premium Starfield. Played through it once doing all the sub-plots and side quests chasing that Bethesda dopamine and just not finding it. I rebirthed a couple times and found it unsatisfying. I played over a hundred hours looking for the fun and only found tiny pockets of it. I put it down. I came back when the expansion dropped, played through, and felt no compulsion to continue. Nothing draws me back to this like the others. There's a cold sterility to it that just doesn't allow me to engage with it, especially the cardboard characters. Sara is literally the only support cast member I can name a year later.
I'm unlikely to pick it back up ever again. Definitely no interest in future DLC.

I really tried to like it during my 99 hour playthrough. A few quests were great. The gunplay is pretty great. But let's be honest. It's a fast travel simulator, the companions are very boring (not to mention goody Two-Shoes), the upgrading is generic and not very inspired and all but a few well designed maps are lifeless. All of it's major cities should have been on a single planet and they are so small. Am I really supposed to believe that all of humanity moved off of Earth and this is all that's left? What makes a Bethesda RPG special is that ability to set off from the start point and roam and run into unexpected quests and characters. You can't do that in Starfield.

Still loving it here. Packed full of awesomeness.

In fact, thanks for reminding me. I might start another playthrough this weekend

And it's gonna be a long, long time....

Starfield is the posterchild of why Game Pass has value, boring game, saved me wasting money buying it.

As I recall Starfield was the reason Microsoft bought Zenimax/Bethesda for $7.5Billion as they were scared Sony would get an exclusive on Starfield, so they bought the developer to prevent that. Starfield definitely does not live up to the hype/expectations.

Tried probably 5 or 6 times to get into it but just got bored. Not at all a bad game just didn't quite scratch the Mass Effect itch I was hoping for,

It was a great game but without any real replay value after a play through. Haven’t thought about this game since.

Enjoyed my time with it but will never play it again. Zero replay appeal for me, unlike Skyrim for example, where you can have genuinely different builds.

Underwhelming
Archaic system systems and GUI
It really felt like ten year old game in some respects.
I rated the main Bethesda studio in the old days, Skyrim for example.
But they are miles behind top development studios for 2020s era. Stuck in past glory and with old systems and engine.

Kinda summed up this Xbox gen for me. Hoped for a AAA banger but came away disappointed.

Started out kinda fun. But soon bounced off after helping a random scientist with some tree problem in an outdoor shopping arcade I was made to walk around 6000 times before getting back on the loading-screen-train. Did go to a few planets though. Walked some more. Saw nothing. Left.

One of the worst and most disappointing game I've ever played.
Seriously, I'm still amazed at how much is just plain wrong with this trainwreck of a game.
Thought Bethesda was overrated prior, now I just think they're absolutely incompetent, especially when they don't have other people's lore to work on.

It's still a waste of time. You can spend hours in the ship builder, to mainly watch it in the cutscenes that feel like they make up most of the game. They expect you to do the same "slowly float through the lights" bs over and over and over with zero variation, and the powers you get suck. Maybe if you play through the game enough times they start to become decent, but why do I want to do that? Speaking of why do I want to do that, who thought it was a good idea to have a thousand empty, barren planets that are less interesting than standing in the middle of a corn field?

The problem with Starfield is it feels like nobody filtered through the ideas to throw out the bad ones. "Let's have a thousand procedurally generated planets." Cool, what are you gonna do on them? "Let's have a minigame to get the powers." Only one? Imagine if Breath of the Wild only had one shrine you had to do over and over. "Let's include a ship builder." So what do you get to do with that ship? And the worst, "The game really opens up after X hours." And until then?

Unfortunately most of Starfield's problems are structural, and can't be fixed without completely overhauling the game, and Bethesda isn't going to throw that much money at it. It's pretty telling only 18% of players on Steam have played long enough to hit level 50.

Love it still play it now not for every one I guess.

I really enjoyed it at launch (Steam) and recently returned to it and love the new updates, especially the recent Watchtower dlc/creation club, so now I can have a fleet of ships and have all new parts to make them from. Well, when I'm not modding in the Enterprise that is

Comment section seems overly negative for the 2023 GoTY(ahead of BG3).

My first play-through required several restarts, just to get used to it.

I can really appreciate all of the quality-of-life improvements that have come along since then. I think that I have now played through the campaign about four times.

Accidentally stumbled into Shattered Space, the first time. But completed it, once, the next time around. When I was more prepared.

My favourite part of the game so far has been the Andreja romance-plotline. Fantastic.

Just loaded the game, just now, and walked into the Lodge. Vasco says “Hello Captain, I have not seen you in a Looong time”.

Does the game remember that have not played it?

I have no real desire to replay Starfield again, not for a long while. As I probably overdid it at first.

So I will start with, I love the base game.

However, I was hoping that there would be some story closure or additional lore to explain the artifacts (I am fine with the Unity and most of the established colony lore) and it just isn’t there. For a game about exploration and discovery, it makes significant parts of its lore undiscoverable. Part of the reasons for human limitation is our tech, starfield mcguffins that away, so to me it would seem logical that we can find out more about the universe instead of peering deeper into the human psyche of greed and control (Starborn infighting, Humans going to war despite being the last remnants of our species). Without that spark of discovery honestly I kinda wish in game humans just stayed on earth and got wiped out with everything else. Why survive to keep doing the same things over and over?

That for me is what makes TES and to a lesser extent fallout work. I am constantly learning about lore and the world. In Starfield, humanity hasn’t been in space long enough to give the inhabited planets history. So they hold little interest. I just spend my time exploring uninhabited planets at this point.

(all is forgiven if I can marry Hadrian though…)

It's like a 6/10 for me. I go back to it every now and then but it's only for a couple hours. I only ever got like 20 hours in

Empty and all the Encounters are very limited, with zero variation despite being on different planets.

No grit or drama, every NPC is very similar in personality, and there is little to no choice or dilemma in the content I saw.

Played 2h but i don't really know why, got bored quite fast. It's in my backlog but it felt too long before things got going.

I'm convinced i'll give it another go, especially with all the new things they added since launch.

Long forgotten already. Spent around 10 hours in total, which were very boring.

@OldGamer999 I actually did enjoy Starfield but it's hard to argue with what you say there. It is, undoubtedly, archaic to play compared to some more modern RPGs and it does feel as though Bethesda REALLY need to get back to the drawing board and start from scratch for the next game.

It’s a great game that has several flaws. Should have been far fewer planets with more details on each. The loading screens are a bit much. Also seeing Cyberpunk and Kingdom Come 2 come out after really showed how dated Starfield’s rpg elements are. Was overall proper rated and it didn’t deserve a GOTY nom.

@Tdx you need to play more games cause there are better RPGs this gen fam

@SeaDaVie most people liked the game and it sold very well but a lot of the mechanics are dated when looking at games like Cyberpunk and KCD2

I personally still love starfield. And I honestly believe that the people who get bored with the game have no imagination. They want the game to tell them what to do, instead of creating their own story with their own mind. And they just want the game to be a mindless shooter where they're constantly killing things. Those people need to just stick to PVP games.

Yeah the game has its flaws, and there are certain things that could be better. But overall, I have a blast playing starfield, especially when I use my own imagination to create the story I want for my character. Like for instance, I pretend that my character doesn't even know about the artifacts or about constellation yet. Currently, my character left the corrupt ryujin to become a bounty hunter, which in turn will lead me to freestar eventually. But all I'm doing right now is collecting bounties and building. Lol

It was good, but not great, and far from fantastic. They played it safe, the story was interesting enough, but the characters and the world(s) ultimately had no pop, it just felt stale and wooden in its entirety. Can you recommend this game? See, that's a tough one, it's not for everyone.

Very disappointed with starfield it was a very dull game and the bugs back when I played made finishing the main story impossible I won't be going back unfortunately ✌️

It's a big hit to Bethesda's reputation, to be sure. Fallout 76 never did quite measure up and TESO has the most boring gameplay on the planet. They are popular games, but maybe that says more about the state of the video game industry as a whole when mediocre games are this popular. The continued popularity of GTA 5 is a great indicator of this. I have little faith in the next Fallout and Elder Scrolls, but I will get them, because what else is there?

@MegMachine87 Exactly! So many highly rated "RPGs" don't even allow you to use your imagination in this way - with voiced/named protagonists, a strict main questline, etc. I have fun playing Starfield not just because of the graphics or atmosphere or music but because it's my character and my narrative - I control the thoughts and feelings of my character rather than the game dictating it - that's immersion.

I’ve been back a few times but just drop of so quick and never finished. I rated Skyrim / fallout 3 as my fav games. I feel the additional build mechanics has taken away from the time they have with other things so story etc suffer. My personal opinion

A dud , a flop it came and went

I forgot about it until I saw this article of yours.

The first time I played through the game was a bit overwhelming in the direction of which quest to complete before other quests and also what level to be at to complete certain quest. My second play through was Great! I think there should have been more creative ideas about both fauna and flora of each planet and also the bases and stations of the galaxy should have been a lot more creative. Each cave in Skyrim seemed to a little different. Each while planet of starfield seems to all the same. I thought when Microsoft bought Zenimax/Bethesda it would mean that the geniuses at Microsoft and the creative powers of Zenimax/Bethesda would make a power house of a game. Some aspects are very good! Most aspects are underwhelming. Like the load screen ever 3 seconds.

As a storyline it's utterly terrible. Some of the missions take upwards of 2 hours to complete and the lack of a way to teleport to the surface of a planet after a lengthy dungeon baffling.

But if you immediately ignore the storyline and play it as a freeform space RPG it's fantastic. There are so many great questions, loads of factions to work with or just roleplay anything from a space pirate to a greengrocer.

I played it for two hours and tried to like it. But got really.. really bored.

Enjoyed it but won't be replaying it. Was good not great.

The most boring game I’ve managed to play, even got early access but I spent 2 months just to finish the game and the best part was certainly the ending, I don’t know how Bethesda could fumble this so badly, it had the potential to be the next big space saga after Mass Effect and ended up being not even close and the worst BGS game to this date.

@carlos82 That's mighty impressive!!👏

It was a fun game! I had my fill though. I did New Game+ 5 or 6 times through the (spoiler). I doubt I return to it.

Starfield was a big disappointment. I haven’t gone back after completing it.

I am a fan of the game who stepped away to...play other games. My playtime was about 20 days (game save, little fluff). There are many vocal detractors many of whom never played the game and who are sour, disingenuous people.

Keeping expectations grounded, I would like to see the next update come with game mechanic additions and tweaks. There are some low-hanging fruit that could be tackled. We have grown accustomed to CoD and Destiny head-pop and "reward sounds." Starfield could do with more graphic violence.

I've had an amazing experience with the main game and Shattered Space expansion. Loved both and put lots of hours in it (100%ed)

I'm really happy with the game and of bethesda ever release a new DLC, free or paid, I'll be there.

The game is about as mid as you can get, not bad, not great. The problem is & this isn’t just a Starfield problem but when a game is in development for so long & gets hyped up so much before release & is just meh, it’s easier for it to bet beaten up, brushed off & people move on. There are side quests in Witcher 3 I still see people talking about years after release, Starfield had none of that, just very boring & generic design.

I got all exctied about it stupidly bought the £100 digital edition to play early. And now it's sat on my hard drive gathering virtual dust. Played it quite bit (not completed the main game though) but just go bored of the endless fast travelling, quest box-ticking and repetitive RNG planets and bases. I'll probably sell my Series X before long and just delete it.

It was of the games I bought my Series X for. upgrading from my Xone video player.
I enjoyed the game on Gamepass for a bit , but as not a monthly subscriber (i dont like subs and tend to just jump in for a month here and there when there's a few games i want to try) , i waited and purchased a copy for £22 for the base game.

I really liked the game at first , but find that the slog to get anywhere quite tiresome. going to planets and finding you don't have the firepower to overcome the hostiles , resulting in you legging it to another place to find more of the same.

It's like the opportunity to progress is stifled by poor implantation of being able to actually have enough resources to actually complete any missions.
The idea is great but its damn frustrating at times.

Never played it, likely never will. I always thought it looked as dull as dishwater and outside of a few dire-hard Xbox fans, who were desperate for it to be the second coming for Xbox, the general consensus is that it is as dull as dish water.

Maybe I might reconsider when I can get it for under a tenner then I'll mod it. However, even mods for Starfield are thin on the ground next to some of Bethesda's other titles.

@Kezelpaso agree, played for about 60 hours waiting for the Bethesda magic, but it was nothing but tedious busywork with weak storytelling.

@themightyant

I had a look on Nexus and there isn't a great deal of mods that make a huge difference. Seems modders have little interest in the game either.

@themightyant

If the modders aren't all that interested in a Bethesda title then that speaks volumes.
I'm still seeing new gameplay changing mods appearing for Skyrm, for example, all the time

@themightyant

10k is still a hefty number for sure, but it's the content that's important. As you pointed out a lot of UI and ship stuff, but nothing of any real significance.

I've several Skyrim mods that are whole, new islands that incorporate major gameplay updates. One of which is a Dark-Souls themed island complete with the stark difficulty and AI patterns the Souls series is known for.