The Best at Nothing (Starfield Review) 

They deliberately didn't give you vehicles to explore the planets becuase there is nothing to explore.

I bought Starfield for $100 to get the early access. I played for a few hours, got bored, then started playing Battletech a turned based MechWarrior game. I've been playing that for 2 weeks straight and to me, it's much more fun.

No man’s sky has actually gotten really good! I love the exploration! I love the expeditions! I love perma-death mode! Story is a little weak, but I love the gathering and building up to better and better things. I love how casually I can play. I highly recommend it, it is 1,000 times better than launch because Instead of giving up and writing it off as a failure, the team really worked to make NMS something amazing. ❤ Love it😊

I know this is a broken record take, but i dont understand why bethesda refuses to learn from new vegas. Maybe it hurts their self esteem that their best published game was made by different developers but that new vegas level of rpg is most of us want. Hell, at this point i would love for some other studio to shamelessly rip off of new vegas.

100% agree with you. I haven't played much of it yet, butt a mood killer for me in this game is: That you spend more time on your map fast traveling here and there not been able to just go where you want like land on planets like in no man sky (i know not possible with this game) but that's what an RPG Space game should be capable of in 2023 (NoManSky, Starlink: Battle for Atlas from 2018, Star Citizen, Everspace 2...) it just KILLS the whole atmosphere of the game...

maybe its because Fallout was already an established game with a really in depth lore so bethesda just had to attach their first person exploration element to it, that made them huge with morrowind and daggerfall. Elder Scrolls, before todd howard it was already established with Daggerfall. The lore. So Elder Scrolls had en established lore already. This game...is the FIRST game of this series, if theres ever another starfield. But it SHOULD establish a lore and universe that you care about for future games. Like tamriel Morrowind, Skyrim, Oblivion are just 3 fully fleshed out detailed sections of tamriel, you have like 6 other countries that arent explored at all in Tamriel in single player outside of Arena and ESO. So maybe if Bethesda doesnt have an established lore to jump onto they struggle perhaps. We really cared about Fighters guild, mages guild, thieves guild. The imperials in Morrowind. We really cared about those guilds. Its so important to make the factions interesting and important individually to make the player give a sht. In Morrowind the dwarven ruins were SO fcking cool and interesting. You genuinely wanted to more about them. Starfield needed something that the player is really curious about. Oblivion had the elven ruins.

Xbox fans are really dumb if they still claim starfield is goty lmao

Every Bethesda game is basically a Gmod toolkit for modders to make games with. (Frost survival, zombie apocalipse ect. In Fallout 4)

I think Bethesda failed when they decided to make the space aspect of the game to realistic. Dude they could of done something weird and alien maybe a couple solar systems revolving around a black hole. Maybe those solar systems move fast enough to intersect with eachother so you can easily fly between then you just have to do a Skyrim wait for a couple in game hours and then hop in your ship and fly to the planet! That would of been so cool! Then they could of had an interesting story that explained how things got to be how they are

The most depressing part of playing Starfield is knowing that Bethesda is going to do the exact same thing with Elder Scrolls 6. If this is peak RPG for Bethesda then I have no more optimism for the next Elder Scrolls title and they have killed any hype I may have felt.

It's kinda funny that BG3 launched earlier than Starfield to avoid being overshadowed by it, instead BG3 overshadowed Starfield. Oh how the turn tables 😂

10 fleshed out planets would have ironically made the galaxy seem more alive then the galaxy with the 1000 planets we got instead

My favorite part about Starfield is load screening out of a building to load screen into my ship to load screen to another destination to load screen into that destination to fill out a job application then load screen back into my ship to load screen to my destination to load screen out of my ship to load screen into a building to talk to a guy

The reason they didn't add vehicles is because if they did you would quickly see how shallow each planet is

I feel you dog. After 60 hrs of Starfield, I was like Forrest Gump when he was just instantly sick of running all over the damn country. I literally stopped mid-play. Nah, I'm cool. Gonna go eat grass, or whatever we supoda do with it.

Take a shot every time Cross says “expiration” instead of “exploration” 🤣

Remember the amazing nightclub in Omega in Mass Effect 2? The music, the lights, the dancers? It was 13 years ago. Bethesda games launch games that are older than the old ones.

As bad as cyberpunk was at launch. Damn near all of its major side quests are better then any mission in starfield. One of the best side quests I have ever played in a game that felt like a writer who never got to put his story into a full experience got the opportunity to in cyberpunk and he didn’t disappoint. I’m talking about the “I fought the law” quest. What even better this quest leads you to another quest that’s also great. RPG done pretty well for a first person shooter experience.

Imagine some reviewers gave this game a 9 or even a 10. It's an assault on real quality games like Baldur's Gate 3 or TOTK

I was saying to my friends that somehow Starfield feels smaller than previous Bethesda games. Initially I was excited to explore but once you've seen one planet, you've seen them all. There's nothing to find. No loot worth hunting down. Even smuggling is pointless. The fact you lose everything when you start NG+ renders everything you do as absolutely pointless.

You can land anywhere by holding mouse down. Gives you a 6km-ish zone with procedural stuff or at least their pathetic version of it. There are only a few outpost designs, they are always the same layout all the way down to enemies and loot boxes.

After playing BG3 for 150 hours, you really notice how in Starfield, the top dialogue option is always the "right one". The RPG element tells such weak stories in comparison.

5:20 this perfectly describes my problem with recent Bethesda games and their design philosophy. I feel they've gotten so lost in the "say yes to the player" they forgot that it's not always applicable. Sometimes saying no to the player can create something interesting.

Starfield is the epitome of mid. Good some of things. Great at nothing. Bad a few things

"No, I did your shitty side quest too" that line killed me

11:42 The dark brotherhood in oblivion actually had consequences for going against them. You would be thrown out and "The Wrath of Sithis" would come to you in your sleep to kill you xD If you survived you could return.

You should do more reviews cross. This was the most put together review I’ve seen. Everyone else has hard time putting their finger on why they do or don’t like it but you got straight to the point

I'm not really surprised Bethesda's RPG structure hasn't changed in 15 years. Lots of people have tons of nostalgia for those early games and keep bringing that to each new entry. I personally never had that and I'm astonished they think a game like this is anywhere near the level of BG3

Does anyone remember in skyrim on Xbox the game would let you actually speak the dragon shouts with your own voice and it would work. Just a gimmick but it was pretty fun

My favourite summary of Starfield is “See that planet? You can fast travel to it” 💀

In BG3, my friends and I decided to murder all of the story party members. 3 in game days later we were hit with a game over from leaving one person in particular dead. I respect the game for punishing us for our choices. Well done.

Man you have a great writing skill. This was well put together script. I really liked this review

It's suffering from the procedural generation downfalls, maybe inherent to current space exploration games, vast boring emptiness. But that in itself can be intriguing when done well, when flying your ship through it is the thrill.

Dishonored 2 did two realities, like past and present time jumping mission much more compact/shorter, and less boring/annoying. Starfield does this it feels you walking through filler rooms, to waste your time, not to find something new. And there are some rooms, where every bloody locker/crate/box/computer is locked.

Agreed 100% BG3 is so much more fun. Even multiple play throughs are still better in my opinion than Starfield.

There's no ground vehicles because there is nothing to explore.

I waited for this game for years, and it's my favorite game genre, but I'm sad to say I agree with everything Cross said. 2023 will be forever a sad year for me after the huge disappointments with Starfield and Diablo 4 (one of my favorite franchises ever).

Its good to see someone keep it honest about this game. To many youtuers act like they were paid to review it or something

I agree that it's very mid. And I feel like everyone around me thinks I'm crazy for saying that. I appreciate that i'm not the only person who feels this way, although I do for entirely different reasons then you do. It's like we came to the same points of critique but from different angles.

I played 100 hours and it's fun for what it is I guess, but it just made me want to do another play-though of Prey 2017 so that's what I'm doing; this will be my 7th play-through so far.

The problem isn't the Bethesda-ness of it, it's the fact that they haven't evolved their gameplay systems or engine to evolve it over the past 2 decades. It IS possible to have a unique Bethesda quality to their games while still pushing technology and systems forward. They just can't do it for whatever reason.

To save you some time....... it's a rubbish game don't buy it.

I think people gave Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim a pass because they were (for the most part) very immersive games with lots of bugs. They had a very heavy rose colored glasses effect, including me because I love Skyrim and Oblivion. Starfield finally made people realize that Beth games are becoming low effort AI procedurally generated garbage that relies on their fans to fix.

"I'm not asking Bethesda to reinvent the wheel." well you actually should ask them to do that since there are no wheels in the game.

I love how when you are in orbit the planets are literally just jpegs. The fact the planets don't appear bigger or smaller depending how you move kills any sense of speed. You can be going 1000 mph towards a planet and it looks and feels the same as not moving at all

All of my friends were super excited for this to come out and when I asked why they said “Because it will be great with mods”. So I then decided I’d buy it in a few years when it goes on sale for $15. I don’t understand the point of buying a game on release that is anticipated to be bad until people put UNPAID work into modding it.

Skyrim was great and fun BEFORE mods were implemented. Thats the difference

I really love this review you did. Checking your channel- I didn't see many reviews. You should definitely do more reviews!!!

Sounds like Cross needs Armored core 6

My biggest gripe was the lack of tools for traversal. Like you said, it's 2023-- we had horses in a game that came out over a decade ago to traverse the land of Tamriel and we can't have a vehicle attachment for our ship? No Mini Merry II for Starfield??? I hope they can release an update soon before my attention span completely drops for this game with other competitive titles out there

Can't believe Tod called this his magnum opus... Lol

I chose to let a camp buddy prod my eye out last night in Baldurs gate. Everyone "disapproved" but now I can see invisible people. Its RPG mechanics are unmatched. You have NO CLUE what will happen next as a first time player. I still want starfield eventually though...

Armored Core was also amazing. This year has been amazing. There’s also spider man that still has to come out

That vehicle bay idea for the ship is amazing and I guarantee that it will be a mod, but honestly why is this even a thing, it should be in the game already

I agree with most of this. The exploration doesn't work because there is nothing to discover. Also, I despise the fact that the "dungeons" are all identical. If you have seen one "abandoned cryo facility" then you've seen them all. All the doors and even enemies are in the same places. Even the difficulty level of the locks seem to be the same. Once I realized, I never visited the marked "facilities" on planets or moons unless it was a specific mission to go there. Also... inventory management. No stores have money and you are constantly getting stuff to sell. And you must sell if you want to afford a proper ship, yet the stores rarely hold over 5000 cash. Then there's the issue of the tone. The entire game seems so friendly and un-grimy. I thought Neon would be this big, sprawling city with questionable people, but it's just a tiny "cyber theme park" that feels empty (though it was still my favorite location in Starfield). Comparing it to Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 is ridiculous. All the cities are so small. It feels like there's only a few thousand people living in the entire galaxy. Like: why are people living on desolate moons when 99.99% of the surface of Jemison is lush greenery? I would expect "New Atlantis" to be a planet-wide city (basically being the capital of humanity). And yes, I didn't expect to be able to explore all of it (obviously), but at least give me the sense of size. New Atlantis seems to have housing for a few thousand people tops. Where is everyone?

Had to stop the video to say this is the voice of the people. Hard truths, not sugar-coating. Not out of hate, but observation. Kudos, you're the first one to do this for starfield =]

Aztecross: I have played every banger game this year. Armor core 6?

I've seen either people REALLY REALLY love it or it is meh! From what I seen it looks decent but I am okay if I never get to experience this. Props to the folks having fun tho

Finally! A review that reflect exactly what I've experienced. I do not get why some people are so hell-bent on defending that garbage of a game. They had 8 years, 500 people and 200M$ and thats what they gave us! Seriously!!!!

You're probably gonna get a lot of crap but i 1000% agree. I think the one big open map helped so so much with the immersion factor of previous Bethesda games and Zelda. It's worrying i feel more immersed in fallout 76 than starfield.

Yeah I think the expectations were what was off. The Witcher, Mass Effect, Skyrim Final fantasy 15.... All 4 of those games are role-playing games and they are literally nothing alike. You don't get a BioWare role-playing game for the same reason you get a Bethesda role playing game. Starfield doesn't need to be more like baldur's gate. Or vice versa. You just prefer one kind of RPG over another and that's fine. But I know why.... I enjoy Bethesda role-playing game and it's for a completely different reason then I would a choice based role-playing game.

you actually can land on any spot in a planet. just not on water. u just click on it and you can land on that spot in the planet cross

What we wanted was the seamless freedom of no man's sky, the story and characters of mass effect 2 and the deep rpg elements of baldurs gate 3. What we got was fallout in space, circa 2015

I will say I did expect bigger monsters and aliens along the way and have been let down with that so far.

Bethesda fanbois: shut up this Game should be Game of the Year Everyone: ok, what about Baldur's Gate 3? The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom? Street Fighter 6? Resident Evil 4 Remake? Dead Space Remake? Bethesda fanbois: HEY THAT'S UNFAIR Everyone: BUT Y'ALL SAID STARFIELD SHOULD BE GAME OF THE YEAR

The new game+ idea and being reborn is pretty much exactly like No Man Sky.

I was honestly hoping that this game would have the same exploration aspect as NMS. Being able to physically fly from planet to planet was extremely fun. Starfield promotes exploration, but gives you an over glorified fast travel screen. So the only exploration you experience is from the planets themselves. I fully agree this is nowhere near GOTY.

Upnext... Skyrim re-re-re-re-master It Just Works Edition includes Turd Howards fart in a jar.

*Possible Mild spoiler* For BG3 I absolutely agree with Baldur's gate 3. I was playing BG3 and found a secret children hideout in a village. The children told me to leave, I didn't, the one of the kids said I'd be sorry and ran away. A few hours later, I saved a boy from harpies and he said to talk to a kid in the same village but because I didn't leave the other kids hide out, I was unable to continue the quest because the leader of the children refused to talk to me. Haha whoops.

Just seeing that Tumbler Sparrow for a split second at 14:17 brought me back to my Destiny 1 Days! Looks like I’ll be hopping back into Destiny 1 again! 👍

I was lucky enough to not have heard any of the hype, I didn’t even know about this game until the game awards last year, so going in to this game I didn’t know anything so I was pleasantly surprised with this game and have been really enjoying my time so far

Well no need to worry cause it didn't even got nominated lmao

Starfield is far and away my personal game of the year. But the only other game I bought and played this year was Lightfall so.... low bar.

At the end of the day, i think Bethesda's level of ambition in creating their games, greatly surpasses their capability as developers.

Spot on review, imo. I felt the same way. Now THIS is the last time I pre-order a Bethesda game. No, really, it is! Pinky-swear!

I never heard of Starfield until like 2 months ago. My hype was for Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty and for Baldur’s Gate 3. And suddenly, there was all this fuzz coming out of the blue (from my point of view) about Starfield, that would be the next revolution in gaming, etc. I am very happy not to have let me be influenced to get interested into Starfield, and that I stuck to the games I had been hyped to from the start !! 😅

nothing to explore, no enviromental storytelling, boring quests....fallout 4 was a masterpiece in worldbuilding compared to this

I don't think your combat should copy things like Destiny or Doom Eternal but it should at the very least not be filler. Bethesda has never had good combat, Elder Scrolls is awful, TW3 has a better combat system and I still TW3's combat sucks, Starfield shows that VATs carried Fallout because it has weak gunplay but it's time to stop excusing this. It's not hard to make a competent FPS, Far Cry does it everytime. Whatever the next Bethesda game is, it's combat should at the very least not be filler because as much as people want to pretend it's about exploration or role playing, most of the character progession systems in video games affect combat.

Other than loading screens starfield is an amazing game, people are just bitter about fallout 76 or jumping on the wagon so their content gets views

I'm disappointed, mid is the right word. There wasn't a hook, I was too tired and sore after it got kinda fun. Fallout 4 was better.

Thanks for an honest review. Keep up the good work. I can't wait to play Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (waiting to play with my son), Final Fantasy 16 & Baldur's Gate 3. I'm going to continue with Cyberpunk and finish that up first. I'm so behind I haven't even started Elden Ring & Horizon Forbidden West yet? 😮

I guarantee you the lack of surface vehicles is simply due to it being built on Bethesda's shitty 20+ year old Creation engine. Fast movement demands faster drawing of polys/textures. There's no way their engine is capable of that. It's the same reason there is no surface flight / ship landing. And now apparently TES VI is going to be built on the Creation engine engine as well... not great news IMO. I don't know why they are so stubborn.

I am with you, I played Sykrim, Fo76/3/4/NV, Elder Scrolls Online, but haven´t bought Starfield, although I was looking forward to it, until I saw official gameplay trailers about it. Not a single trailer looked engaging. Bethesda is like Piranha games, they are simply not evolving 15:06 - 15:20 was just the best, how you got louder and louder

When I beat this main quest I felt exactly like you do here. But, then, I considered that all of the companions are Constellation. I beat it iwht not companions because they're so annyoing, but I at least figured I coiuld take one WITH me through Unity with whom I could point out the differences. Yeah, no, that's not how that works. And, did you learn anything about the supposed aliens that *built* these artifact things? I mean, it clearly all has writing and so on. There's bound to be more of it found outisde of their temple stuff....right? No. Collect the powers 10/10, collect the artifacts 10/10, presto.

You actually can land wherever you want on a planet. You just have to click on the area and you can make a new landing spot. Although it doesn’t change how bad the exploration is. You can land wherever you want

I got called a pony by an Xbox fanboy because I said I found the game boring. I’m far from a console warrior and barely even turn my PlayStation on but there is a huge percentage of Xbox fanboys defending and hyping up the game only because it’s now a Microsoft exclusive.

Dark Brotherhood questline in Oblivion is still one of my favorite questions in any game ever.

Once i beat Starfield i didnt sit and recollect on what i just experienced and how i felt. I just felt existential dread knowing that TES 6 is more than likely going to be mediocre, safe trash like i got with this one. I can't believe Fallout 4 was a better game.

The game is wide as an ocean & has the depth of a puddle. Probably good way to describe it

Waiting for Cross to play Armored Core 6

Your points are all valid; and yet, I'm loving this game. When the modding goes nuts, it will just be more fun.

the meatriding for Starfield is crazy. I feel like the Starborn stuff could be WAY more interesting if the Starborn were actually aliens and there was no parallel universe bullcrap.

No offense but you’re calling Starfield mid when you play Destiny 2?? I got a good laugh from that

I really liked Starfield when I was playing it most of September. I could see the flaws however, I wasn't blind to the fact, that the game was kinda mid, but I enjoyed my time enough to complete it twice before deciding on taking a break. Then I played Baldur's Gate 3 for the first time and it became much more apparent how low my standards have been. If it wasn't for the fact that the modding community of Bethesda games were more ambitious than the game studio itself (in proportion to their respective available resources) I doubt I'd ever play Midfield again.

Since the open world isn’t truly open adding a traversal vehicle would have made the worlds feel even smaller than they actually are.

There’s hundreds of publications that give out game of the year awards, GOTY doesn’t matter because there isn’t one unified body that gives out the award.

Cross!! You need to give Fires of Rubicon a try if you enjoyed Remnant 2; super challenging with some great customization!!

Starfield also has a MAJOR quest-breaking bug that tons of players are running into. It completely stops your ability to acquire new Starborn powers. Who knows when or if the morons at Bethesda will ever patch it, and the only "solution" right now is to just go to NG+ and hope the same bug doesn't happen. It's the radiant quest "Power from Beyond" where Vladimir gives you locations for temples. There is a common issue where the anomaly distortions simply will never appear on your scanner and the temple will not spawn due to other worthless landmarks that have already spawned on the map at the same location. Reddit and the forums are filled with players who have this bug, and no solution is in sight other than to start a NG+ and hope for the best! Imagine a development company so completely inept that the main quest-line for obtaining the game's main super powers is broken.

When the highest bar for this game to pass was “will it work on launch?”, it automatically set itself to fail.

I had fun with Starfield. I mixed together main stuff, faction stuff, & side stuff. Lot of hours. The flaws are legit and can be annoying. But I enjoyed the journey. The music was nice and ambient. I'm okay with pulling back on action. The main story was boring. The faction stuff was great.