Starfield is the latest action RPG game developed and released by Bethesda. I’ve only played 5 hours so far, and I’m already thrilled with the gameplay.
Although Starfield was available for Premium Edition owners a week before its official release, I decided to wait a bit, see what the general reception was. Given how a lot of Triple-A games tend to be awful on release (or they always seem to be released incomplete for the sake of getting them to the consumer as soon as possible, and then actually complete the game in the form of DLCs or patches), I felt I had to be skeptical about Starfield.
Meanwhile, I’ve had an itch to start a new save for Fallout 4. However, I wasn’t motivated because I already completed every quest and discovered all of the locations, and I didn’t feel like playing through the story again with a different play-style.
After I noticed that streamers were actually having fun with the game, and that people were saying that the bugs aren’t actually bad, I decided to give it a whirl. It only took me an hour or two to be fully engaged with the game. This might possibly be the best RPG game I’ve ever played. That itch I had for Fallout 4? It was scratched and relieved. In fact, Starfield took a lot of gameplay elements in Fallout 4 and took all of them on a whole new level.
Let’s take a look at some of the gameplay features of Starfield and my first impressions and general thoughts on them. I also made comparisons with Skyrim and Fallout 4, because it’s kind of hard not to! But if you haven’t played those games before, don’t worry! It’s easy to pick up and play this game even if this is your first Bethesda RPG. If you’re on the fence and trying to decide on whether to play Starfield or not, read on!
Caution: Minor Spoilers Ahead, Maybe?
Although I did my best to avoid any spoilers in this article, there still might be some content that’s considered a spoiler. I completed about 4.5 hours worth of gameplay in a save for this article, which includes (little) exploration of 7 planets/moons and a quest for Constellation. You can also check out the table of contents to see which parts of the gameplay I cover.
Setting the Settings
After trying to tinker with the settings for roughly an hour our so (possibly an over-exaggeration of mine) I can certainly say there’s a lot of configuration settings for Starfield, and a good chunk of them aren’t done in-game.
Firstly, let’s take a look at what you can configure inside the game.
In-Game Tweaks
Within the Gameplay section, you can set the game’s difficulty and when the game autosaves. That’s straightforward enough, I think.
Next, under the Display section, there’s a lot of things you can configure. One of which is the Borderless Full Screen – You can set it to either On, or Off, although I find it weird that you can’t choose actual Full Screen. There’s also a Graphics Preset slider that will set the quality for Shadows, Lighting, Reflections, Particles, Crowd Density, Motion Blur, GTAO, and Grass all at once, but you can also set each setting individually too, if you wish. Other configurable options include V-Sync, Upscaling, VRS, Film Grain Intensity, and Depth of Field.
Moving on to the Interface section, you can customize parts of the HUD UI, including showing or hiding the Crosshair, Floating Markers, Damage Numbers, Item Information, and overall HUD Opacity. These are settings you can only see once you’re actually in game.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of options to look through for the Controls. Just like the settings for the Interface section, you can only see the Controls settings in action once you’re in game. You can choose to use inverted flight controls, modify Look and Aim Sensitivity and Ship Reticle Sensitivity, turn on or off controller vibration and hotswapping (not sure what the latter is), and set the speeds for Outpost FlyCam movement.
For the control bindings, you can look through the Bindings section. There’s a lot of controls you can change the bindings for. The game can read the side buttons on your mouse, so you don’t have to depend on your mouse’s software like Razer Synapse or Logitech G Hub for the bindings.
Once you’re finished with the bindings, you can look through the Audio section. You can customize the Master Volume or individual tracks, such as Effects, Voices, Music, and Footsteps for either your character or other actors.
Finally, the Accessibility section offers ways to improve your Starfield experience, including setting subtitles, how you want to rotate items, and whether you want to use larger menu fonts. You can also choose to toggle in your iron sights, if you’re used to aiming down the sights that way.
There’s more settings you can configure that are done outside of the game. This can be done if you’re on PC and on Steam or Game Pass.
If you don’t care about the next part, you can jump straight into the discussion about character creation!
INI Tweaks
There’s more configurations you can make within the INI files. This is typical for Bethesda games on PC, so if you’ve played Skyrim and Bethesda-era Fallout as well, then you know exactly what we’re going to talk about. Yes, we’re talking about StarfieldPrefs.ini and StarfieldCustom.ini!
Both StarfieldPrefs.ini and StarfieldCustom.ini should be located in the Documents\My Games\Starfield directory, and if they’re absent, you can simply create the files yourself. They can be a little tricky to configure because there’s some settings that will work in StarfieldPrefs but not StarfieldCustom, and vice versa. For example, I was able to get fMouseHeadingXScale and fMouseHeadingYScale to work when I put them in StarfieldCustom.
At first, I was bummed out when mouse sensitivity conversion to Starfield was a premium-only feature on mouse-sensitivity.com, but some players noted that Fallout 4 sensitivity works just as well (which, I assume, is due to engine similarities). I’m using my Skyrim Special Edition sensitivity, which seems to work well enough for my needs with Starfield.
There’s also some settings that just won’t work regardless of which file you put them in, such as bFull Screen. It’s supposed be a setting you can set to 1 in StarfieldPrefs.ini, but I’m skeptical on whether it actually works, because my mouse cursor can still easily go to my second monitor as if I’m playing Borderless Windowed. If it’s truly not working, then I guess I’m doomed to playing this game Borderless Windowed.
Author’s Note: Apparently, there isn’t much of a performance difference if Starfield is played in actual Fullscreen mode, and Nvidia Control Panel can verify G-Sync is on with this game. However, I would still like have an actual Fullscreen mode for the peace of mind.
One thing that frustrated me about Starfield’s gameplay out of the box is that the vertical mouse sensitivity was not the same as the horizontal sensitivity. I developed my aiming muscle memory playing Overwatch and thus I try to keep the sensitivity the same in other games like Skyrim, xDefiant, and Halo Infinite. However, while I was engaging in combat, I found myself over-aiming targets and missing flicks I usually hit simply because the vertical and horizontal sensitivity weren’t one-to-one.
I was amazed to see that other Starfield PC players were also frustrated with it. Thankfully, there were a couple of suggestions on how to fix it: You can either set the vertical sensitivity in the settings 20% higher than what your horizontal sensitivity is, or configure with a more precise number within the INI files.
The fix I’m using is implemented in the StarfieldCustom file, in which I set fMouseHeadingXScale and fMouseHeadingYScale to 0.021 and 0.042 respectively under [Controls]. Apparently, the value you set for the Y Scale depends on your Aspect Ratio, so for 16:9 (which is what I have), I was actually supposed to set it to 0.03738, while 0.042 is what I should use if I’m on a 21:9 Aspect Ratio monitor, even though it feels much better for me on my current setup. Values for other Aspect Ratios can be seen in this guide, under the Step 5: Normalize Mouse Sensitivity section. You can see what other settings you can add to your INI files in there, as well!
Character Creation
Just like any other Bethesda RPG, you have the opportunity to create your character just the way you want to. Before you get there, you have to play through the basic controls tutorial: How to move around, shoot rocks, and use your helmet’s flashlight. Once you go through a trip, you’ll be asked to recall who you are, and this is where the magic begins.
As expected, character creation is very in-depth. You might spend a whole amount of time just sculpting your character just the way you want to, including the body weight, walk style, hair styles, and nose shape, to name a few. If you don’t want to go through each and every little detail of your physical appearance, you can also settle on the presets you like.
It doesn’t just stop at customizing your looks – you also have your background and traits to think about! One thing I despise with RPG games is when they force your character’s origin story. I don’t mind if there’s not many details, like in Fallout: New Vegas where you got shot in the face delivering a chip, or in Skyrim where you got caught in an Imperial ambush trying to cross the border – You can easily just say you’re a lonely wastelander without a family trying to get by making deliveries, or you can say you’re a Tamriel traveller who just wanted to visit Skyrim and see the Blue Palace in Solitude. In Skyrim, you can even discuss your family with Serana, a vampire, and decide on the relationship you had with your parents.
Then there’s the story in Fallout 4: If you’re Nate, you’re a veteran who fought in the Resource Wars, and if you’re Nora, you’re a law graduate practicing as an attorney, and you both share a child together. Regardless of who you choose, your character is fully voiced (which really makes me heckin’ peeved, as discussed in my article about EVERSPACE 2)! At least you can still choose your name (which, if recognized by the game, will be spoken by your robot assistant) and you can customize your partner’s appearance, although it’s not really worth spending too much time doing that.
Anyways, back to Starfield – If you take a look at the Background tab, there’s a lot of different options you can choose from! You can say you’re a Bounty Hunter, a Chef, or a Pilgrim. What’s very impressive is that, even with a plethora of backgrounds you can choose from, you can still opt to be a mysterious figure and choose [FILE NOT FOUND], right at the bottom! This flexibility probably wasn’t asked for, but is greatly appreciated.
Regardless of what you choose, it will choose your character’s starting skills, giving you a head start in setting up your abilities and your goals for your current save. Supervisor Lin will also make a comment about it once you’re finished with the character creation.
Finally, you have the Traits tab, which gives one final opportunity to have your brains picked out even more. What makes selecting your Traits a little challenging is that each trait has a pro and a con. For example, if you pick Introvert, your oxygen depletes slower when you’re fighting alone, and faster when you have someone in your party.
Selecting some traits can also lock you out from selecting other traits. For example, if you select Introvert, you can’t select Extrovert, and if you select Freestar Collective Settler, you can’t select Neon Street Rat and United Colonies Native, and so on.
Don’t forget that having traits is optional, so go ahead and pick one or two that you like, but don’t feel obliged to fill out all the slots!
To wrap up character creation, you get to name your character. I was very happy to see that you can choose your pronouns as well! It’s initially chosen when you select your Body Type, but you can still choose He/Him, She/Her, or They/Them when you’re also naming your character. This wonderful little detail rounds off the best character creation I’ve ever seen in any RPG game, which ensures that anyone is able to create the character they imagine to be and see them come alive in the world of Starfield.
Gameplay Mechanics
For a massive game like Starfield, there’s a lot of stuff to cover here, so let’s go through some of the notable features of the gameplay:
Combat
I’ve already addressed the aiming out of the box under Setting the Settings INI Tweaks, but to repeat it: Aiming with the mouse initially sucks because the horizontal sensitivity is not the same as the vertical sensitivity, and it threw me off because I’m used to flick-aiming my targets.
Once I was able to fix it, I thoroughly started to enjoy Stafield’s combat mechanics, and it’s one of the best I’ve ever experienced. Shooting a weapon in this game feels extremely satisfying, as it feels like the gun-play in Apex Legends and xDefiant. If you’re wielding a compatible weapon, you can auto-peek out of cover, as well.
Meanwhile, shooting an enemy’s head won’t grant instant death with most weapons, but will still deal critical damage. This is why I try to match my sensitivity settings with other games and was very critical with the vertical aim sensitivity, because flick-aiming is how I usually land critical shots, and without fixing it, I miss the shots I expect to hit.
Levelling Up
As you gain experience shooting things and completing objectives, you’ll level up your character. Gaining a level grants a skill point you can spend in your character’s skill tree, and I like how you have to complete challenges to complete the skill level-up. For example, once you invest a skill point in Ballistic Weaponry, you unlock the first rank for that skill and you must get 20 kills with any ballistic weapon before you can use a skill point to unlock the next rank.
Do you remember selecting your background in the character creation? You have a head start in three skills depending on what you chose. Make your selection carefully so you can reduce the amount of grinding needed to grow your character within your intended playstyle.
Flying and Navigating Your Ship
Flying a ship is a new experience for me in video gaming (other than when I played EVERSPACE 2 for a little bit), and is something I found a little overwhelming at first! There’s a lot of micromanagement that takes place here, including managing your speed, looking after your ammunition, and allocating power on your ship.
The way you allocate your ship’s power is all up to you, and it depends on your play-style! For example, since I already have a skill point invested in my ship’s ballistic weaponry, I can allocate more power in ballistics over missiles or lasers.
Unfortunately, you can’t idly fly to another planet or system. You have to go into the star menu, select a planet, moon, or another system, and travel there. If you have a set course, you can also point your reticle to the destination marker, and you’ll see a prompt for a key you can press to easily travel, instead of having to go into the star menu.
Outside of the cockpit, you can do other activities on board, like eat, sleep, or manage your cargo hold. If you have any companions or hired crew with you, you’ll see them hanging around. If you don’t like your ship Frontier anymore, you can purchase better ships down the road!
Lockpicking and Hacking
If you’re breaking into a storage container or hacking a terminal, it’s done with a digipick.
I find it fun that using a digipick is like its own mini-game, which also took me a little while to figure out. One thing I realized early on is just because a combination fits, it doesn’t mean it’s the correct combination to use! You can only use a combination once, so you’ll have to be careful, as a used combination might’ve been a better fit for the next pattern.
Dialogue
As I’ve already mentioned, I prefer having a silent protagonist, who – other than having grunts and stuff – doesn’t have any spoken dialogues. That’s why I was ecstatic when the dialogue in Starfield was like this. After initiating a conversation with someone, you just simply make your response and immediately hear the response from the other person.
The camera zooms directly into whom you’re conversing with, similar with how conversations worked in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It took a little while for me to get used to it again, and while it’s not the worst thing in the game for me, I preferred how dialogues were in Skyrim where there wasn’t any zoom.
You may also be able to engage in persuasion with other characters, where you have different response options to choose from, ranging from easy to hard, and you have multiple chances to persuade them until you no longer can’t. You can improve your persuasion skills as you level up your character to make future persuasions easier.
Over-encumbering
In past Bethesda RPG’s, if you were over-encumbered (in other words, the total mass of your inventory surpassed what your character can carry), you were only able to walk. In Fallout 4’s survival mode, you would also take damage. This could be a pain if you’re scavenging for stuff to sell, and it didn’t help if your companion became over-encumbered too.
Meanwhile, Starfield handles being over-encumbered differently. It’s much better that being over-encumbered will drain your oxygen very quickly and you have to stand still or reduce your movement/walk to recover it. There’s still some sort of movement penalty but it not too bothersome and you’re not punished if you can make it running to your ship’s cargo hold, for example.
It’s also super convenient that you don’t have to have whatever you want to sell in your inventory. To keep a light load, you can leave all your junk and clutter in your ship’s cargo hold, and you can access the cargo hold inventory while selling to a vendor.
Companions
NPC’s play such an important role in the game. They give you quests, fill you in on information you need to know, and introduce you into factions.
They’re also very powerful companions to have around. You can trade items with them and equip their weapons and outfits for them. If you don’t mind the small talk, you can request permission to ask them personal questions, which gives you an opportunity to get to know your companion better and ultimately get closer with them. Finally, if you have the Empath and Extrovert traits, you can gain some powerful combat and movement buffs.
Outpost Building
Vasco, your robot companion, will talk to you about outpost building in unoccupied territory for field research. You can construct a variety of structures for scanning, resource extraction, defending, and eventually manufacturing advanced equipment!
You don’t have to start this right away – you can tell Vasco you’ll try this out once you touch down on a planet. It all starts with placing down an outpost beacon, which will allow you to build objects and structures. These require resources to build, so make sure you’re using your scanner out there to collect as many resources as you can find. You can store these resources in your ship’s cargo hold, meaning you don’t have to have them on your inventory as you build – The resources in your cargo hold will be automatically deducted.
Building an outpost can be a bit overwhelming to pick up at first. However, once you understand what you can build and how structures and objects snap together, it becomes a breeze and you can let your imagination run wild. You don’t have to be alone in your outposts too, as you can hire crew for them.
An Immersive Universe
I’m very impressed with how active the universe is. Places like New Atlantis and Cydonia are full of life, bustling with unique people. In space, you can see different ships flying around and grav jumping. On land, you can stop and listen on different conversations taking place. Guards who engage in idle talk with you can often give you activities to participate in and places of interest to check out. If you’re in a mining settlement, you’ll hear a public address announcement that an explosion is imminent, followed by a countdown for the explosion, and when you can expect the next one.
Each place has its own unique atmosphere to take in, whether you’re in the beautiful euphoria of New Atlantis, or the depressing industrial depths of Cydonia. Regardless of where you go, security is super tight. As you enter a populated system, your ship has to be scanned for contrabands. On land, there’s security checkpoints you have to pass through as well. In New Atlantis for example, you have to keep walking through a designated zone as you get checked for bounty, which actually made me feel like I was going through a security checkpoint in reality! I haven’t seen consequences of failing these checks yet, so I’ll be on my very best behaviour!
Meanwhile, you might think you’re alone on the moon of Kreet, but there’s actually a lot of alien biodiversity that’s worth scanning, and this is also true for any planet or moon you visit. You’ll notice that all creatures have their own temperament, and most will not harm you unless you get too close or provoke them. You can also collect a bunch of different resources, which is super important for outpost building. It takes a few scans of an organism or a resource to fully understand its properties and characteristics, so it’s worth having your scanner out and scanning whatever you see.
No Wrong Way to Play
What makes Starfield so special is that there’s a lot of different ways to play the game. You can focus on the main storyline or go through the side-quests first, side with a faction, side against a faction, focus on ship combat, scavenge for resources and power up your favourite weapons or cook the best meals, or turn this game into a little business simulator and look for new crew-members to hire for your ship and your outposts.
Regardless of what you want to do, levelling up your character and investing in your skill tree will help you get to how you want to play. There’s no right or wrong way, and if you’re satisfied with the outcome of one save, you can start a whole new game and take a different approach! The choice is yours, and the way you want to experience Starfield is in your hands.
Modding
Although Starfield’s official modding tools won’t be released until 2024, there’s already a plethora of mods available on Nexus Mods.
While I was doing a test play-through for this article, I was thinking about how much I was going to mod this game once the tools were released. I initially felt that the vanilla gameplay was fantastic enough that I’m not sure if I would desire any similar mods I had for Skyrim and Fallout 4. I don’t think I need texture replacements because they’re fantastic and detailed enough as they are. I also don’t think I need a better companions mods because I mainly use them to remove permadeath for followers, and that isn’t a problem in Starfield. However, I do wish Starfield had some sort of survival mode in which sleeping and eating food mattered more.
Then I fell into the Starfield modding rabbit hole: I wanted to find a way to improve the game’s colours and contrast. Using ReShade is one option, but I chose to use LUTs since you don’t have to perform any extra installations. This Reddit post provides a fantastic resource for comparing many of the different LUTs available. I went ahead and tried Reduced LUT at 75% contrast, and I’m already impressed with the results! Most of how the game looks vanilla is retained, while some areas are dark enough that I actually do need to use my helmet’s flashlight.
Other mods I added into the game include UI mods like StarUI, the ones made by Stentorious, Smooth Ship Reticle, and the Scanner Encumbrance Display with Time. I’m also using Stentorious’ Clean Vanilla Hit Marker which gives me an option to use a cleaner hit marker with a dot crosshair for all weapons. These mods greatly improved my experience and overall quality of life with Starfield that I can’t imagine playing without them, now.
I’m hoping these are all the mods I need for Starfield, especially for my first proper play-through. I don’t really feel like going through the same trouble I did with modding Skyrim, Fallout 4, and managing everything with Vortex.
Closing Thoughts
There’s a lot of other features about this game I haven’t talked about in detail, including upgrading weapons, spacesuits, and ships, as well as cooking food and manufacturing medicines. Let’s be real, here – If I talked about everything you could do in this game, this article would never end!
With all my desired mods and INI tweaks in order, I started my first proper save for Starfield, and I just can’t find the words to describe how much fun I’m having. This game is truly something beyond my imagination. The worlds, outer space, and everything you can do – It feels like you literally can do anything in this game! I’ve only have five hours on my current save so far, but I can’t believe how much time I invested in creating my character, improving my weapons, and customizing my Frontier.
The best part is that this is only the beginning for me and all Starfield enjoyers, alike. I know that I’ve only scratched the surface, and there’s still a lot of exciting content waiting to be discovered. Even if I finish the main story, there’s still going to be a boatload of side-quests to complete, outposts to manage, ships to upgrade, places to scavenge, and there’s going to be even more content to discover when Starfield‘s first DLC, which is called Shattered Space, releases.
Perhaps the biggest surprise I’ve had with this game is the bugs, or lack of. While Bethesda (or Bug-fest-a, as I’d like to call it) games have always been notoriously known for having very silly bugs – whether they’re physics-related or outright game-breaking – I haven’t experienced any silly and glaring bugs so far (knocks on wood). Perhaps the most notable bug I experienced was when Noel, a Constellation member, was supposed to give me a tour of the Lodge and she didn’t, but all I had to do was reload a previous save and initiate the conversation again, and she proceeded with the tour as expected.
Bugs or no bugs, Starfield is on the rise. Bethesda just announced the game has reached 10 million players, which is an astronomical milestone for the gaming company, making the game their biggest launch, ever.
This is only the beginning for a game that has the potential to be one of the best RPG games ever, once everything is said and done.
So if you’re not one of the 10 million Starfield enjoyers, what are you waiting for? It’s never too late to pick this game up and start playing. If you’re on Xbox Game Pass, you can take that one small step and literally download this game and play for free right now. If you enjoy it very much like I am, you can take a giant leap for the Premium Edition, which also grants you the Starfield Digital Artbook and the Original Soundtrack, the Constellation Skin Pack which you can use on an Equinox rifle and your Constellation Spacesuit, and the Shattered Space DLC when it releases.
GHLF and happy gaming!!
