Starfield: did Bethesda promise too much?

Domagoj Belancic

7.9.2023

Translation: Patrik Stainbrook

The discussions around Starfield are lively now the game has launched. Many fans were hoping for more from the sci-fi epic. Did Bethesda promise too much in the run up?

It must be bloody difficult to manage fan expectations for a new game. Especially when it’s a gigantic game like Starfield. Every new trailer is analysed frame by frame, every statement from the development team carefully evaluated. If a studio promises too little, interest in the game is lost. If it promises too much, massive hype builds up around the game, often imploding at launch.

Starfield has also left some critics and fans disappointed. The old point of contention: Bethesda has learned nothing from its past mistakes. Again, too many promises were made but never delivered for the game. But is this really true?

I took another close look at the most important statements made by game director Todd Howard and Co. Did Bethesda announce too much or is Starfield the game we were promised all along?

Starfield will have very few bugs at launch

Bethesda Game Studios are notorious for incredibly bugged games at launch. Usually, it takes months and many patches to get the game to run reasonably without crashes and weird glitches.

For Starfield, Matt Booty, Head of Xbox Game Studios, let the following slip in a June 2023 interview with Giantbomb: «If it [Starfield] shipped today, this would (…) have the fewest bugs in any game from Bethesda(…).» According to Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, this is partly down to the fact that Microsoft delayed the game after acquiring Bethesda. This has given the team more time to finish Starfield in peace and thoroughly test it.

And?

In my opinion, they’re right. Admittedly, I’ve had two complete crashes over my 30 or so hours of gameplay so far. Apart from that, I haven’t discovered a single bug yet. On X, formerly Twitter, there are also surprisingly few clips of typical Bethesda bugs. The tech whizzes at Digital Foundry are also positively surprised by the game’s technical implementation in their analysis.

Starfield will run at a stable 30 fps on consoles

Besides bugs and glitches, the performance of Bethesda games is often problematic at launch. I remember Fallout 3 and Skyrim often running at under 30 frames per second on the PS3.

For Starfield, game director Todd Howard promised a stable 30 fps for Xbox Series X and S at launch in an interview with IGN. According to Howard, Bethesda didn’t want to compromise on game design, which is why 60 fps was never an option. The game could run at up to 60 frames in places, but Bethesda puts more emphasis on a consistent gaming experience. 30 fps is supposedly very solid, even in big shootouts and chaotic scenes.

And?

Yes. I’m playing Starfield on the Xbox Series X. The game is amazingly stable and feels much smoother than 30 fps thanks to visual tricks like motion blur. Only in very large cities like New Atlantis did I encounter isolated drops. Digital Foundry is also impressed by the game’s stable performance.

In Starfield, you can land anywhere on a planet and explore it freely

A big selling point for Starfield are the over 1,000 planets you can freely explore. The feature was first introduced at the Xbox presentation during Summer Game Fest 2022. Todd Howard announced in a video that you could freely choose where you’d want to land on a planet.

After the presentation, there were many unanswered questions about how exploration would work. Fans were most interested in whether you could explore a planet seamlessly – as is possible in No Man’s Sky, for example. In that space sim game, you can theoretically circumnavigate a planet on foot.

Bethesda didn’t provide a clear answer to this before Starfield launched. According to Bethesda, the planets are a mix of procedurally generated and hand-designed elements. In an interview with Lex Fridmann, Howard mentioned «huge landscape tiles» that are procedurally generated when a player decides to land on a planet. Bethesda, he said, had developed a system that wraps these tiles around a planet and puts them all together. He made a similar statement in an IGN interview: «We make these large (…) tiles we’ve generated, and those get kind of wrapped around the planet.»

In this year’s Starfield Direct, Bethesda hinted that not all tiles would be seamlessly connected: «(…) you do explore differently in this game given its scale. That usually involves exploring an area you’ve landed in. (…) When you’re done exploring, you can walk back or fast travel to your ship.» Pete Hines, Head of Publishing at Bethesda, made a completely opposite statement just a few weeks after the presentation. On X, he was asked if it would be possible to explore an entire planet after landing. His response, «Yup, if you want. Walk on, brave explorer.»

And?

Yes and no. Yes, you can pick out any of the 1000+ planets and land anywhere on it. No, you can’t go around the whole planet on foot. When you land, you are «trapped» in one of the procedurally generated landscape tiles. The tiles aren’t connected to each other. Run long enough in one direction and you’ll be confronted with a pop-up message and an invisible wall.

In practice, this limitation is irrelevant. There’s no point in exploring an entire planet on foot. The tiles you land on are big and offer more than enough to explore. They’re bursting with resources, creatures and interesting structures as well as caves.

Bethesda could’ve communicated more clearly here to prevent unnecessary internet drama. Statements like «giant landscape tiles wrapped around a planet» can be interpreted in many ways. And with a game as huge and hyped as Starfield, statements like these make fans’ imaginations run wild. The result: disappointment at launch, despite this having no impact on the gaming experience.

The moon in the background is real – you can land on it

«See that mountain? You can climb it.» A legendary statement made by Todd Howard in 2011. At that time, he was talking about the huge game world in Skyrim. Everything you see while exploring the fantasy realm can also be explored. Those mountains in the background aren’t a backdrop, but real mountains.

At this year’s Starfield Direct, Howard followed up on his famous quote and took it up a notch. He described what it feels like when you’ve landed on a planet and are looking up at the starry sky: «That isn’t just a backdrop. That moon is actually there orbiting the planet. Yes, you can visit it too. We simulate the galaxy around you.»

In the interview with Lex Friedman, Howard specifies his statement further: «(…) we are modelling all of these systems. (…) You can watch that gas giant or moon, it will rotate and go. Sunrise, sunset (…). And it’s all really happening.»

And?

Yes, you can watch moons orbit a planet and the sun rise and set. This is proven by various timelapse videos online. Like this video from X-user @sprite_flicker.

So Starfield actually simulates the orbits and rotations of planets you can see. Lighting is also generated dynamically depending on the position of the sun. If you’re in space, you can also observe how the planets move around you.

The second aspect of Howard’s statement is a bit more complicated. Yes, you can land on the moon you see from a planet surface. However, the journey to the moon is interrupted by two loading screens. You can’t – like in No Man’s Sky, for example – hop into your spaceship and fly seamlessly from planet to moon. You also don’t land on the same 3D object you see from the surface of the planet. As described in the previous point, the landscapes of planets and moons are only generated procedurally when landing.

If you’re in orbit with your ship, you also can’t land seamlessly on a planet or a moon. Streamer Alanah Pearce tried to land on Pluto. She spent a whole seven hours trying this. In the end, she clipped through the celestial body.

Starfield is by far the biggest Bethesda game

Bethesda hasn’t been stingy with superlatives when marketing Starfield. According to Todd Howard, the game has over 250,000 lines of dialogue – more than Skyrim and Fallout 4 combined. The Character Creator has more settings than ever before. New Atlantis is the biggest city Bethesda has ever built. Also, there are more weapons and weapon mods than in any other Bethesda game.

And?

The individual statements are difficult to verify – perhaps data miners will come up with definitive answers in the future. What’s for sure: Starfield feels gigantic. The game doesn’t offer you a seamless world, but all the more content and variety. The number and range of locations, quest lines and events you can experience in a short timeframe is staggering. Therefore, the statements about game size are more than justified.

In Starfield, you can be a sandwich pirate

At Starfield Direct, Bethesda had the development team talk about their personal experiences in the game. One developer prefers playing as a space pirate and specialising in stealing sandwiches. She places her stolen snacks in her spaceship.

What at first sounds like a funny anecdote is now the subject of much discussion online. The story implies that Starfield has «item persistence.» Meaning, the game tracks the position of items, such as stolen sandwiches, and saves them permanently – definitely not a given in such a huge game.

And?

Yes. Similar to other Bethesda games in the past, Starfield also tracks the location of objects. However, due to the gigantic size of the game, this is even more impressive in Starfield. The game tracks not only the position of objects, but also their status. For example, if you open a door, it will stay open for the rest of the game.

John Linneman of Digital Foundry tested item persistence in the game over a long time. To do this, he placed several soap dispensers on the dirty floor of a public restroom in the Wild West town of Akila. He then completed several missions and explored at least ten different planets. Lo and behold, the soap dispensers were still on the floor.

Side note: all objects in the game also have realistic physics. Reddit user Moozipan demonstrates this in a short video. He filled a room in his ship with potatoes. Just look at that cornucopia of spuds tumbling forth! Beautiful.

You can design your spaceships completely by yourself

At Starfield Direct, Bethesda also talked about the shipbuilding editor. Their promise: you can let your imagination run wild and build crazy constructions. From giant robots to animal-like ships, anything is possible.

And?

Yes. The shipbuilding editor actually gives you an incredible amount of freedom when building. Tinkering can quickly become addictive. Many fans already recreate well-known ships from other games, movies and shows. I’m excited to see what creations the community will conjure up in the future.

How satisfied are you with Starfield? Did you expect more from the game or do the statements made by Todd Howard and Co. line up with your gaming reality?

Read Phil’s detailed review of Starfield here:

Or watch our video review of Starfield here (in German):

Domagoj Belancic

Senior Editor

Domagoj.Belancic@digitecgalaxus.ch

My love of video games was unleashed at the tender age of five by the original Gameboy. Over the years, it's grown in leaps and bounds.

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