Benjamin Vito

Starfield has the potential to be one of the greatest games of the decade (as do most of Bethesda's RPG's). It has a very interesting storyline, it has very fun exploration aspects and it has very deep character development (from a skill perspective). The overall vibe and look of the game will draw you in, albeit after a very slow start. The graphics are usually very good. There are clearly cons when it comes to things the Bethesda has overlooked: resource management, poor balance between rare and common resources, level scaling, late game XP scaling, etc. The pros include: Great exploration (surveying planets being a great aspect), modern Fallout-esque combat (sans V.A.T.S.) and some very interesting lore. The history of the various factions and the dynamics of interacting between them is very entertaining. The game does truly capture the wonder of exploration and discovery. I can't speak to the overall storyline as I haven't had the patience to finish it (even after 100+ hours of gameplay), all because: The biggest problem with Starfield is the stability. Bethesda games generally struggle with stability issues, but Starfield is on another level entirely. It goes from having minor glitches and bugs at lower levels to being unable to run for more than an hour at levels beyond 50. The constant fear of the game crashing whenever you pause or fast travel is ludicrous. Combine that with the instability of Xbox Cloud Gaming, and you get a game that crashes constantly, takes 10+ minutes to restart (unless you're playing after midnight) and periodically will revert your save, wiping hours of gameplay. This last issue is commonly presented with an error message stating that your "other" Xbox taking a long time to sync, even when you don't have another Xbox. For the record, I have never seen this issue with any other game. Perhaps it works better on PC. After playing other games on both Xbox and PlayStation exhaustively, I can confidently guess that it would work better on PlayStation, if not for exclusivity. Overall, I would classify Starfield as a game with great potential, but only if it actually worked. Given that it works for roughly an hour per session when you're deep enough in the game to be immersed, I would call it a fantastic waste of time and money. Bethesda's engineering and QA teams have reached an all time low. Perhaps if the technical issues were worked out, this would be a great game. Until then, however, it has actually moved me to cancel my Xbox Game Pass subscription.