Was Starfield Worth the Hype
Two and a half years, one poorly received expansion and a PS5 release later, the gap between what Starfield promised and what it is has not really closed.
Starfield launched in September 2023 to solid critical scores and a player reception that got worse the longer people played. That gap has been the defining feature of the game ever since, and the events of the last few weeks have brought it back into view: the PS5 version arrived on 7 April alongside a new expansion and a substantial free update, giving a large new audience its first look at a game the existing one had largely finished arguing about.
What it does well
Worth stating clearly, because the discourse around it has flattened into dismissal.
The shipbuilding is excellent. It’s a proper constructive toy with real depth, and a significant number of players have put substantially more time into it than into the main quest. The gunplay is the best Bethesda has produced by a wide margin, benefiting visibly from having a studio that had made Doom in the same building. And the handful of genuinely good faction questlines, the Ryujin corporate storyline in particular, are as strong as anything in the studio’s back catalogue.
What went wrong, structurally
The problem was never the number of planets. It was what sits between them.
Bethesda’s games work because of continuous, hand-placed space. You walk in a direction, you find something you weren’t looking for, you get distracted, and three hours pass. That loop is the whole product. Starfield replaced walking with a menu. Selecting a destination, loading in, crossing procedural terrain to a marker, and loading out again isn’t the same activity, and no amount of content volume compensates for losing it.
The procedural surfaces made this worse rather than better. They’re large, technically impressive, and mostly empty of the incidental detail that made the studio’s earlier worlds worth traversing. Repeated points of interest across different planets became the emblem of the whole problem.
The post-launch record
Shattered Space arrived in September 2024 and didn’t help. It gave the game a dense, hand-built location, which was the correct diagnosis, but the execution landed to mixed critical reviews and considerably worse player reception, sitting near half positive on Steam. For an expansion positioned as the answer to the main complaint, that was a serious result.
The free updates did more good. Official mod support through Creations, a land vehicle, and rebuilt map interfaces addressed real quality of life problems. The vehicle in particular changed how the surfaces feel, which raises the obvious question about why it wasn’t there at launch.
This year’s Terran Armada expansion takes a different approach, spanning the galaxy rather than concentrating on one location. Early community reaction has been divided, with a recurring complaint about length relative to price.
The comparison it cannot escape
People keep asking whether Starfield can have a Cyberpunk-style recovery. The honest answer is that the two situations aren’t analogous. Cyberpunk’s problems were technical and systemic, and both of those can be rebuilt. Starfield’s problem is architectural: the loading structure and the procedural generation are load-bearing decisions made early, and you can’t patch a game into having a continuous world.
Where that leaves it
If you want a competent, well-made science fiction RPG with excellent shipbuilding, good shooting and a few strong questlines, Starfield delivers that, and it’s now cheap and available on every relevant platform with substantially more content than it launched with.
If you wanted Skyrim in space, meaning that specific feeling of wandering and being surprised, it doesn’t do that, it never did, and it isn’t going to start. Three years of updates have made it a better version of what it is rather than a different thing, and being clear about that upfront is the difference between enjoying it and resenting it.