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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And now I feel as though I can answer that question: Starfield does suck. But not completely, and not necessarily in the ways that I had expected.
I’ll start with the genuinely good stuff: the factions. Or more specifically, the faction quest lines.
These are some of the best, most involved faction-based stories that Bethesda has ever made. And while I know the bar isn’t especially high for characters and storytelling in Bethesda’s output, Starfield offers up actual choice and consequence on a surprisingly frequent basis.
I found myself caring about the outcomes of certain quests, which really did come as a shock. What’s more, getting to know these factions adds some much needed weight to the game’s world building; without them, the Settled Systems’ history and thematic tones barely register.
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In my opinion, Bethesda should have done more — way more — to place these factions front and centre. I was seriously struggling to become invested in Starfield’s universe until I gave them a shot; they’re the closest the game gets to feeling like an older, more focused Bethesda title.
By comparison, Starfield’s main quest line, in which you become a member of an explorers guild known as Constellation, is profoundly dull. It sees you hunt down frustratingly vague space artefacts across procedurally generated locales, and it has none of the intrigue or personality of the surrounding faction campaigns.
That said, Constellation’s outings do give you an idea of just how vast the game’s galaxy is, and I do think the overall scope — not the execution, it should be stressed — of Starfield is impressive. 85 hours later and I hadn’t even visited a tenth of the available planets.
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But this is also where the game starts to fall apart, and quite rapidly at that. Bethesda’s strength has always been in its ability to coax you off the beaten path and find your own adventure — but it typically accomplishes this by tempting you with distant landmarks across dense and, most importantly, handcrafted open worlds.
Starfield attempts to evolve that concept, by giving you a seemingly infinite number of potential distractions. Look at all the planets! Each and every one of them, yours to explore!
Except every planet is stuck behind at least two loading screens, killing much of the cohesion. And while that criticism can seem a bit petty, it does run counter to the developer’s DNA; Bethesda games have always had loading screens, yes, but here, they separate the galaxy in such a tedious way that excursions start to feel disjointed.
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The illusion I mentioned earlier begins to dissipate, and then it’s shattered when you actually touch down on a planet’s surface and the whole place is a depressingly basic mishmash of repeated assets and textures, pieced together by an unimaginative algorithm.
In some ways, this procedurally generated approach is a logical step forward for Bethesda, a way to provide a constant stream of adventure. You can practically live a second life in Starfield because the content just never ends.
But it’s also Bethesda’s aforementioned DNA stretched to breaking point. For a game that relies so heavily on randomised locations and quests, Starfield does a staggeringly bad job of keeping things diverse.
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I must have visited the same abandoned cryogenic lab to hunt down the same band of apparently evil space pirates 20 times during my playthrough. 20 different planets with the exact same facility, with the exact same layout, and with the exact same enemy placements. It takes the piss.
And again, Starfield is built on this stuff. The game’s underlying gameplay systems, like character levelling and loot, rely on you picking up non-specific side gigs from a hub area and proceeding to the objective. It’s never-ending content at the cost of your own sanity.
Maybe that’s a tad overdramatic. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy hoovering up new weapons and spacesuits from conquered enemy hideouts — I ultimately quite liked the grind.
But I would have liked it a hell of a lot more if I wasn’t seeing the same hallways and faceless enemies over and over again, and the solid if completely unspectacular combat had something akin to Fallout’s V.A.T.S. system.
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It’s cliche to suggest, but Starfield is a game of more that ends up being a game of less. I’ve got a theory that Bethesda overreached to a borderline catastrophic degree with this project; the concept of making a Bethesda game that isn’t just one open world, but thousands, was just too good to ignore from a marketing perspective.
But when the teams realised that wasn’t possible, they fell back hard on all of the procedural crap. When, in my humble opinion, they would have been much better off just scaling everything down, and sticking to a more traditional Bethesda experience set across a handful of purposefully made planets.
Granted, that take’s probably been echoed a million times by now, but this is what I mean when I say everything I heard about the game ended up being true. I can totally see why someone would get lost in Starfield for hundreds of hours, but I can also fully understand why you might play it for 30 minutes and think it’s utter rubbish.
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At the risk of sounding like one of those Steam reviews where the guy’s played a game for 2,000 hours but somehow doesn’t recommend it, I don’t think Starfield is very good. I think its technical performance is borderline unforgivable in 2026, and I think the game’s plagued by structural problems.
But. But. It has scratched that Bethesda itch I’ve had since playing Fallout 4 to death over a decade ago. It certainly doesn’t get my hopes up for The Elder Scrolls 6, but for me, the Bethesda formula still clicks on some disgusting, primordial level.
It’s a 6/10.
What are your thoughts on Starfield? Have you been through a love-hate relationship like Rob? Stumble upon a loading screen in the comments section below.
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Robert (or Rob if you’re lazy) is an assistant editor of Push Square, and has been a fan of PlayStation since the 90s, when Tekken 2 introduced him to the incredible world of video games. He still takes his fighting games seriously, but RPGs are his true passion. The Witcher, Persona, Dragon Quest, Mass Effect, Final Fantasy, Trails, Tales — he’s played ’em all. A little too much, some might say.