YMMV / Starfield

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The Hunter insists that the Emissary is dishonest, manipulative, and a would-be tyrant. He knows them better than anyone else - but they also are in eons-long opposition over control of the Artifacts, and the Hunter wants to win. If the player sides with the Emissary, the Emissary is entirely above-board, providing useful information while support and adopting a more benevolent interaction with humanity after the player ascends to Starborn. There's also the fact that the Emissary hasn't met the player character before in this context because the player always dies in every other universe, so they may indeed be more confused than cunning.
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • The relationship status with your companions isn't factored into certain relevant story events. If you marry one of them and they end up dying during the main questline, you can hook up with another companion before your late spouse has been given a proper sendoff. You can even show up to their memorial service alongside your new flame and nobody will bat an eye. Dialogue choices when talking about your loved one also don't change at all, making it seem like the Player Character forgot they were married the moment their spouse kicked the bucket.
  • Similarly, the endgame revolves around going to a new universe, leaving your spouse (and if your spouse was Sam, your step-daughter Cora) behind as you all get sent to different universes. As the game doesn't keep track of what you did in your previous playthrough beyond player stats and powers, your character effectively forgets all about the loved ones they've lost, and never remarks upon them even as you meet their duplicates. Furthermore, if you get married after the point in the main story where you learn that this is the ending, no one mentions how this marriage is kind of clearly doomed.
• Award Snub: Starfield's lack of nominations, much less wins, for the various gaming awards became a contentious issue among the game's fans and detractors, leading to many prominent arguments over the game's merits. While the Starfield is not without flaws, to not even be nominated for categories like "technical achievement" qualifies as a snub, even factoring in the heavy competition it faced against the likes of the critically acclaimed Baldur's Gate III.
• Awesome Music: "The Sol System", which manages to capture the awe-inspiring beauty of space as you fly through it. It also has a slightly bittersweet tone to it, fitting of it being named after humanity's home star system in which the home planet of humankind, Earth, has been reduced to a dusty wasteland.
• Best Level Ever: One main quest mission that stands out is "Entangled", a grueling Marathon Level with Dual-World Gameplay between two alternate versions of a science lab where an Artifact research project went horribly off the rails. The well-written story, seamless switching between realities, clever use of level geometry on both sides, incredibly tense atmosphere, and the presence of a secret Golden Ending that requires players to think outside the box and pay attention to the dialogue and set dressing make Entangled a fantastic level, especially considering it is part of the main story.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Andreja is very cagey about her background, but if you've had any contact with Va'ruun zealots at all, you'll recognize she's part of this faction just from looking at the design of her outfit, especially coupled with the fact that she's introduced as being hunted by their more zealous members, doesn't want to talk about it, and makes repeated references to her "family" who raised her to hate and distrust outsiders. Her revelation that she's with the Va'ruun is nonetheless treated like a shocking reveal (and none of the dialog options offered to the player in response allow them to express anything but shock.)
• Complete Monster: Lucas Drexler is the CEO of Infinity LTD, dedicated to outdoing the rival Ryujin Industries no matter the cost. When he learns that Ryujin is developing a new neurotechnology, Drexler hires the vicious Ecliptic mercenaries to slaughter an entire mining outpost with an order to Leave No Witnesses as they steal the neurotechnology components. Drexler then uses the technology to conduct a batch of heinous, lethal experiments on hapless patients unaware of the danger, with Drexler's only concern as the bodies pile up being the money to be made when the technology is perfected.
• Critical Dissonance: Professional reviewers have been largely positive, but player reviews have been more seriously mixed - citing technical issues, divisive gameplay, and story designs, leading to Starfield feeling more "dated" compared to contemporary games and overall "Mixed" user ratings on Steam
• Crosses the Line Twice: The 2023 "Deep Dive" revealed the return of the Adoring Fan, lusting over the Player Character to the point of wanting to breathe the same air just like a Yandere would. It's downright creepy with a hint of Squick. The fact that it's the Adoring Fan of all people, and you get to bring them along before potentially ending their life where no one would ever find them? Hilarious.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Red Mile Maulers are hyper-aggressive, damage sponge, armored, quadrapedal lizard beasts that swarm you and have a quake attack that can stun you from afar before they close to melee range. It doesn't help that Porrima III, the planet they're on, has twice Earth-standard gravity, so running from them will tire you out quickly. They're Super-Persistent Predators, so you can't get far enough away from them to lose interest so you can fast travel to escape as well. To add insult to injury, killing one yields a paltry 6 XP.
  • Unsurprisingly, terrormorphs, this game's take on Fallout's deathclaws. They're fast, incredibly tanky, hit like a truck on steroids, and advanced versions can even use a Dig Attack or turn invisible at will. Unlike the Maulers mentioned above, defeating a terrormorph awards a large amount of XP and rare crafting components, so there's at least some benefit to running into one, assuming you survive the encounter.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The Ryujin questline has a massive one in its latter third. The first half-dozen quests are trivial, but what follows next can turn into a very frustrating experience if your character isn't highly proficient in sneaking, lockpicking, pickpocketing, and persuasion. Most quests past this point require you to stealth past large numbers of guards (including hard-to-fool robots and turrets), and although you can fight your way through, your employer makes it abundantly clear that this is not how you're supposed to approach these missions.
  • Each star system is labeled with a recommended level. Sticking by that, with a reasonably proficient character build, you'll be just fine... on foot. Enemy ships quickly outpace your own if you aren't keeping it updated or taking advantage of certain questlines to get free, more powerful ships. If you're entering a system with a recommended level in the double digits while still using the Frontier, you'll be facing a massive jump in difficulty even if your character level exceeds that.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mom and Dad, only available if you choose the "Kid Stuff" trait, as they represent the first time in a Bethesda game that players can play as a being member of a happy family all the way to the end instead of a dysfunctional one. While you do send them money every now and then, it's a negligible amount (that caps out at 500 Credits, which is chump change by the halfway point), and you get some neat gifts from them if you stop by to visit every now and then. These items range from a Disc-One Nuke in a unique Old Earth Pistol, to an entire (and free!) ship. Needless to say, don't sleep on Kid Stuff. That they're played by Star Trek vets Nana Visitor and Tim Russ certainly doesn't hurt.
  • Kaiser, the Red Devils' resident Robot Buddy from the United Colonies' Terrormorph questline. His visual design is cool enough, but his badassery and stalwart reliability leaves quite a mark despite otherwise only being around for a couple of (fairly difficult) quests.
  • The Crucible on Charybdis III houses numerous and familiar clones of historical figures, ranging from Ada Lovelace to even FDR himself. And you can find a recruitable companion here, too: specifically one Amelia Earhart, whose energy for flying the cosmos is infectiously adorable and a very useful crew member to have on your ship thanks in part to having a high Piloting skill (of course).
  • Amoli Bava, the merchant at Jemison Mercantile, has quite a fanbase. Despite only having a few lines of dialogue, she comes across as incredibly cheerful, and since she's the closest merchant to the New Atlantis landing pad, most players will be stopping by to sell of their loot quite frequently. She also tends to keep some of the rarer minerals in stock, being one of the few vendors anywhere to seemingly always have Titanium in stock, meaning she's also the first stop on New Atlantis for players looking to perform research and upgrade equipment.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • An odd one with Cyberpunk 2077. With Cyberpunk's 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty expansion releasing a few weeks after Starfield, comparisons were drawn that saw Starfield's use of the Creation Engine and its technical limitations as making Starfield feel unimmersive and dated. Detractors particularly drew attention at Starfield's animations, load screens, and limited wanted system compared to those of Cyberpunk. On the other hand, fans of Starfield feel these comparisons are disingenuous as the game is a different genre of RPG, certain animations would never be seen outside of normal gameplay, and that it is unfair to compare when Cyberpunk had three years worth of updates. Others still feel this rivalry is shortsighted, and that fans should enjoy the merits of each game.
  • Another one with Baldur's Gate III. BG3 was originally planned to launch at the tail end of August 2023. Two months beforehand, Larian Studios moved the PC launch forward by several weeks to August 3rd, which some speculated was done to avoid conflicting directly with Starfield's launch. Rather than quell a potential rivalry as one might expect, the move ended up creating one, with some rambunctious BG3 fans going out of their way to hype their game and throw shade on Starfield as the latter's launch approached. Starfield fans responded by singling out BG3's late-game bugs and perceived flaws in its third act's structure. The situation deteriorated to the point that it's rare to find any mention of Starfield and BG3 in the same place that doesn't extol one at the expense of the other. Some believe this unexpected spat between two games with little in common aside from sharing the RPG genre label is a proxy for the "console wars" between Xbox and PlayStation owners, due to Starfield being console exclusive to Xbox, and BG3 being an inadvertent temporary console exclusive to PS5 (a planned Xbox port was delayed to well after the game had launched on the other two platforms).
• Fan Nickname: Unlike previous Bethesda player characters in the The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, Starfield's main character does not have a designated title. In lieu of this, fans have taken to referring to the main character as "The Spacefarer". Eventually, you gain powerful abilities as a result of collecting the artifacts, and taken to be called "Starborn". However you're not the only one Starborn.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• Goddamned Bats: Several life-bearing planets have small, bat-like, flying "Fauna" that can be a real nuisance, such as Jemison's Flocking Seabat Geophages. Most thankfully aren't outright aggressive, but if you manage to aggro them (by, for example, shooting at another creature near them or simply spending too much next to them), you'll be dealing with a flock of small, fast, hard-to-hit creatures which are also hard to run away from due to those same traits.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Sometimes NPCs will walk around without spacesuits, even on planets with no atmosphere. Miners in the lower levels of Cydonia also often perform dirty, grueling manual labor in their underwear.
  • In the lodge of Constellation, there's a display case locked with a Master lock and a mannequin behind it wearing the Mark 1 spacesuit, with helmet and jump pack. Normally one would need Master-level lockpicking to attempt to get it open, but there's a tiny sliver of room between the door and a pane of glass for a player to angle their cursor and just take the suit directly from the mannequin directly with no lockpicking required.
  • A returning bug from older Bethesda games. Some merchant store chests remain possible to interact with through the floor, allowing you to loot them for huge hauls.
  • Travel to further-flung system is normally limited by your grav drive. However, once you visit a planet, you can always return to it via fast travel. If you don't have the cash for a proper upgrade, it's possible to reach a planet in a ship with a powerful drive but limited cargo space, then go back to it in another with a smaller drive but more cargo in order to retrieve resources. Fast travel can also be utilised to smuggle contraband as your ship will only be searched in orbit before you land.
  • Have a ship design in mind but can't get the pieces to connect because of lack of clearance? You can actually make some pieces clip into each other on purpose by switching between a smaller variant and then back to a larger variant while positioning them.
  • Similarly to the above, duplicating a part that's already snapped in place causes the duplicate to automatically snap to the closest free attachment point. This doesn't check if the part fits or not, allowing for the easy merging of parts.
  • Although the game doesn't normally support Polygamy, players discovered that by marrying one companion, dumping them, marrying another and then rekindling the romantic relationship with the first one, the Spacefarer can end up married to at least two persons simultaneously. It's nothing game-changing in the greater scheme of things, but an amusing exploit for roleplaying purposes if you're into that kind of thing.
  • Being an Action Dad, of course you'd expect Sam Coe's daughter Cora to join you whenever you assign the former as part of your ship crew. However, if you leave Sam anywhere else, Cora somehow still sticks around on your ship. Which can be either amusing or heartwarming depending on your affinity towards Sam.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: YouTuber HeelvsBabyface went viral in a rant against the game for having the option to select body type and pronouns instead of sex and gender, claiming that such a thing injects "politics" in the game and destroys immersion into the game world. Some gamers were not particularly happy with the accusation and threw it back at him pointing out that the option is really just an option and that it defaults to the most common pronouns to the body type selected, meaning you don't even have to select anything and accuse him of being outraged for the sake of clicks. Fanning the flames is that there are other YouTubers and sizeable portion of gamers who feel similarly to HeelvsBabyface, and it led to a mess that's best left to another site to document.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the many creative ways players have employed to kill off the Adoring Fan in his home game was to exploit custom spells or the title's wonky physics to send him flying into space. And now he has returned to worship the ground you walked on, in space.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common complaint is that the game shows little improvement or advancement over Bethesda's previous titles. The core gameplay is typical of Bethesda's other flagship series (Fallout and The Elder Scrolls), down to featuring some bugs first seen in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (such as characters falling through the floor, clipping through doors, clustering around doorways blocking passage, corpses spazzing out when they clip the surrounding geometry, etc...) which was released 17 years before Starfield. Strip away the space sim elements (who are often perceived as lackluster and the game's weaker aspects to begin with), and you have a game that in terms of gameplay is almost identical to Fallout 4 or The Elder Scrolls (particularly Oblivion and Skyrim) but Recycled In Space (literally).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Starfield on Playstation is still possible!"^Explanation After Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda, many Youtubers (such as Colin Moriarty) were adamant that Starfield would not be exclusive to Microsoft platforms. This continued even after the acquisition was made official, and Phil Spencer explicitly said that future Bethesda games would be exclusive to Game Pass platforms.
  • The explicit comparison by Todd Howard, to Skyrim, has invited memes built on the idea such as "you spend 8 hours exploring a planet and fighting off bad guys, but the only loot you get is two microscopes, 34 credits, a health kit, and a can of green spaceship paint"^note Which, as it turned out, was pretty much on point, proving Howard right at least in this regard.
  • No Man's Skyrim. ^ExplanationThe 2022 Official Gameplay Reveal featuring a rather barren and dull-looking planet, resource mining with a handheld laser and Todd Howard's lofty promise that the finished game would feature 1000 "fully explorable" planets led a lot of viewers to compare it to the infamous launch version of No Man's Sky and wonder if the game would meet the same fate.
  • "I can't believe I get to stand near you breathing the same air. I've got to have every molecule." ^Explanation The 2023 Deep Dive revealed the Adoring Fan, much to the delight of those who remember the original character from Oblivion. In his reveal, he says this very... interesting line, making him far worse than his Oblivion counterpart.
  • The quest where the military shanghais the player character to go undercover in a pirate fleet after committing a crime has seen lots of jokes, since the game rather aggressively causes it to trigger even if the crimes the player's committed are comically small time, and the player still reacts like a hardened criminal.
• Moe:
  • Cora Coe is this by virtue of being an Adorably Precocious Child with a knack for poetry and science. Her interactions with her old man only drive the point home. Less so if Sam dies, however...
  • Amelia Earhart (yes, that one) of all people can come off as this at times. Especially with her earnest and cheerful personality whenever she's onboard your ship.
• One-Scene Wonder: Despite only participating in two subsequent sidequests, the UC xenowarfare division's Robot Buddy Kaiser manages to leave more of a lasting impression than almost any other side character in the game, mostly due to his unrivalled levels of badassery and determination in carrying out his mission against all odds. Being by far the most human robot in the game in terms of his behavior certainly doesn't hurt either, even more so in light of your own Robot Buddy's shortcomings in this department.
• Player Punch: During the mission "High Price to Pay", one of your Constellation companions will die, and it will be one of the two with whom you have the highest affinity, and may even be your lover/spouse.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: While not an uncommon occurrence in Bethesda games owing to the ease of getting Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer and the Loads and Loads of Sidequests, Starfield really seems to sow this sentiment. The main quest is divisive at best while players tend to spend far, far more time in the game with the side content of exploration, outpost building, ship building, etc. One of the only real reasons to complete at least part of the story is to unlock Starborn Powers, some of which (especially Personal Atmosphere) help to speed up exploration.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Has its own page.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: It wouldn't be a Bethesda title if it didn't have some side activites to distract you:
  • Regardless of how you might feel about the Ship Builder as mentioned under Scrappy Mechanic, you're probably gonna be spending a copious amount of time either trying to build the perfect ship or even recreating sci-fi icons like the Millennium Falcon, Milano, or the Razor Crest, among others.
  • Relating to the above, if you can't quite afford a new ship, there's always the option of stealing them from any Spacers or Crimson Fleet you come across. Just remember to either jettison any contraband your new ship might have (which will be a common occurrence) or offload it at The Den in the Wolf system, as you probably won't have access to Shielded Cargo until you've got enough Credits (and/or enough investment in Spaceship Design) to spare.
  • If you enjoyed the Settlement Building system back in Fallout 4, you'll be right at home with the Outpost system here. Now with the added bonus of being able to make Outposts almost anywhere you want á la Fallout 76.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: A criticism of the game is that it takes several hours to open up, compared to most other Bethesda games which are relatively quick at getting the player into the meat of the game. You'll need to acquire the first artifact, fight off pirates with Barrett, fight through a pirate base to kill a pirate captain with Vasco, and then visit the Lodge on Jemison before you can go anywhere or do anything else.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus seems to be that, while there is a solid foundation, it's unfortunately held back by the Creation Engine being relatively unchanged and still dated on a fundamental level, bland execution of the story, and a decidedly empty world that makes it hard to engage with the game's themes of exploring the universe. Some of the more negative takes on it even include potential modders who outright give up on the game because it's a major letdown compared to Bethesda's previous work.
• Spiritual Successor: People have compared this game to Traveller, which is further emphasized by Todd Howard stated its an influence on the game's development.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • After the disastrous launch of Fallout 76, which the shortfalls of the Creation Engine played a large part in, the internet was not happy to learn that Todd Howard stated in an interview that Starfield would be using a modified version of the Creation Engine which many feel was outdated by and should’ve been retired after Skyrim 11 years prior.
  • After the gameplay demo in the Summer of 2022, some players were put off by the game, feeling as though their worries about the Creation Engine were justified. Not only were there the classic "dead-eyed Bethesda NPCs" but the game was running at a noticeably choppy framerate, and the gunplay did not look like it had improved much, if at all, from previous Bethesda games. Considering Bethesda's track record, they weren't hopeful that these issues would be solved at launch, or that Bethesda wouldn't once again be releasing a technically unpolished game and are hoping that the modding community will bail them out.
• That One Level:
  • "High Price To Pay". Aside from the unavoidable death of a companion on a first playthrough, escaping the Hunter is a harrowing ordeal. He outlevels you by a massive margin, wields a powerful legendary laser rifle that can cut you down in seconds, and keeps teleporting all over the place to keep you off balance. You can try to fight back, but doing so is neither necessary to complete the mission nor advisable given how extremely difficult it is to defeat your pursuer. You're also fleeing through the bustling streets of New Atlantis and panicked civilians will more often than not get in the way of a shot directed at your pursuer, which will immediately net a bounty on you for murder. The mission essentially goes out of its way to deflate any sense of power you may have felt in the game before then, and few would consider that an enjoyable experience. There is also very little indication that this mission is coming or what the game mechanic stakes are. It starts immediately on your return to the Lodge from the prior mission, is the first time you see this antagonist or a hint of what they can do, is the first main quest mission to involve difficult combat, and gives very little time to make the choice on where to go. Any hesitation, going to your room for weapons or checking the Lodge at all and the Hunter will arrive before you can leave, condemning the Eye companion. And there also is no kind of prior warning or opportunity that in addition to doing all your post-mission housekeeping before turning this one in, you should have completed your companion quests before doing the Eye fix-it mission "Short Sighted". This last part can either lead to Permanently Missable Content or kill your romantic interest, since they likely have the highest affinity for you and are thus on the Eye.
  • "Hostile Intelligence", the penultimate mission in the UC Vanguard questline. You like dealing with Terrormorphs? No? Good! Because this mission will require a lot of ammo, some of the best armor in the game, liberal use of your powers (better unlock them as soon as possible), and plenty of patience to gun down loads and loads of these unholy abominations as you make your way through the remains of what was once Londinion. On the bright side, at least you get to see Kaiser in action as he blows some Terrormorph hide to hell.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Although Starfield's Lockpicking Minigame is a fun idea and a welcome change of pace, the fact that you can't open a lock without consuming at least one digipick hasn't gone over well with some players, as it makes your personal skill at playing the minigame completely irrelevant. Also at higher lock difficulty the minigame can become much more time consuming, which can lead to having to do several expert or master locks in a row to become a tad tedious as each puzzle eats a few minutes of time.
  • The equipment upgrade system is largely similar to that in Fallout 4, yet feels like a significant downgrade at the same time. For one, gear can no longer be disassembled for crafting components. Weapon and armor mods are also no longer independent entities that can be switched between items of the same type - if you craft a new barrel mod, the old one is just gone. This in turn means that every time you find an improved version of your favorite gun, you need to craft all upgrades from scratch, and some of them are quite resource expensive. And that's assuming you're even skilled enough to craft what you want in the first place, because removing preexisting mods from looted gear and attaching them to where you want to have them is no longer possible. In a separate downgrade, melee weapons can't be upgraded at all.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: "First Contact" has a brilliant setup for a sidequest: a Generation Ship has experienced a Lightspeed Leapfrog, with the world they were expecting to colonize now the site of a resort, and you need to act as intermediary between the ship and the people already there. Unfortunately, that setup is also where it ends. You have a talk with the crew of the Constant and then are immediately expected to make a decision in your very first talk with Paradiso's executives, with the remainder of the quest being mere busywork for your choice. The two groups have no contact with each other, no heated debates, no conversations, and they give you only the loosest arguments for their own stances. The executives get little characterization beyond money-grubbers outside of one who seems to be on the Constant's side... in his only line. The choices also leave something to be desired: either the Constant lands with the crew going into indentured servitude to pay off their debt for using Paradiso's land or they get a grav drive so they can look elsewhere. There are no other options, not even any persuasion opportunities. The quest doesn't even interact with the worldbuilding at all, such as getting the Constant in contact with the colony-sponsoring LIST or leveraging Paradiso's status outside UC or Freestar space, meaning they have no government to back their claims. In all, it feels like a moral choice was written but the context around it wasn't.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Zero gravity movement has its own set of controls and a mechanic where ballistic weapons push you back with their recoil but laser weapons don't, but outside of the temples (where there is no combat while in zero g), it appears in only about five spots in the game, less than half of which have any combat. Occasionally, you might also damage an enemy ship in such a way that gravity is disabled when you attempt to board it, but this is again quite rare.
• Unexpected Character: It's safe to say no one was expecting the Adoring Fan from Oblivion to show up in the Starfield Direct presentation.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The randomly generatated NPC "Citizens" in various major settlements can range from Gonk to downright creepy, with many players complaining that they look like they came out of a much older game. Add in that their eyes lock onto the player character when nearby, and it makes it seem like they're all staring at you in a very uncanny way.

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