Starfield sure is a thing that exists. It stands as the premier reason why we don’t have Elder Scrolls 6 yet, and as the culmination of Todd Howard And The Ladz effort to create a new take on stellar sci-fi based directly on real life space travel: a genre called NASA-punk.

This puts me in an interesting position. I’ve been known to enjoy a Bethesda RPG every now and then, occasionally, don’t look at my Steam profile. But I am also an actual real life scientist, with actual physics and engineering degrees and all that jazz. It almost feels like Starfield is a gift from Todd to me, for me to to enjoy and criticize every detail of.

So let’s boot up Starfield on the ol’ gaming PC and nitpick all the sciencey goodness. What’s the worst that could happen- excuse me, my framerate is what?

Part 1: I Have Several Questions

One SSD and a trip to Nexus mods later, we begin our adventure on the desolate moon of Helgen Vectera, and immediately we already have some brutal scientific realism.

You can select Professor as your background, implying that our character is an academic who had to sign their life away to work in a dangerous space mine in order to afford food. Because evidently, even in the far flung space-faring future, teachers still aren’t paid livable wages. Ouch.

As we get started trying to repay our student loans, we pretty quickly dig up an artifact of unknown origin embedded in a material called Caelumite. This is a fictional metal and its tendency to defy gravity is frustratingly inconsistent. I do like the name though, likely using the Latin meaning of the word caelum for “sky”.

More important is the artifact itself; these things clearly defy most known physics principals but I don’t feel the need for an explanation since they probably run on space magic. What’s more curious is everyone else’s reaction to this thing, or lack thereof.

The artifact doesn’t seem to be of human make, notable because this setting does not feature sentient aliens. You’d think a galaxy with zero intelligent alien contact suddenly discovering things that humans didn’t make that don’t operate on known physics would be a massive deal, something that every organization in the settled systems would immediately want to be researching and looking into.

But no one seems to care? Only one organization, Constellation, is interested in researching the artifacts and the general public often forgets Constellation exists.

All these factors together create a giant problem with the game. The fact that no one cares about about what is likely a universe shaking discovery is an immersion breaker that I can’t really get past.

Thankfully not everything Lin and Heller say makes me angry, because earlier on they point out that Starfield’s starships run on helium and achieve faster-than-light travel using something called a grav drive.

The ships running on helium implies that they work using nuclear fusion, the type of reaction that powers the Sun by slamming atoms into each other so hard that they physically combine and release energy in the process. This would be an excellent energy source and helium is the second best type of fusion fuel after hydrogen isotopes.

I image helium would be used more often in this world given it’s a noble gas, meaning it doesn’t cause chemical reactions. Or explode. Valuable traits when your ship’s fuel tanks are on the exterior, meaning they can be shot at by pirates.

Additionally the term grav drive is interesting, implying that these ships utilize gravity manipulation to zip between star systems. Gravity does accelerate objects and can hypothetically be manipulated. However bending gravity for acceleration alone isn’t a good way to get up to Ludicrous Speed. What the ships are actually doing is using gravity to bend spacetime and tear open wormholes.

This is also something hypothetically possible in the real world. The warping cutscenes visually show the ship entering an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, which is the fancy term for a wormhole. This is the best currently hypothesized way to get to another solar system light-years away in a hurry. I actually found an in-game book later on that specifically says this is what grav drives do, so props to Bethesda for doing their research on this.

But enough about that, we have company! We’re paid a visit by Constellation’s own Barrett and, more importantly, best boy Vasco!

Vasco is wonderful, and an incredibly realistically portrayed robot. His design doesn’t waste needless complexity at replicating the human form, he’s made of chunky rectangles all simply connected and moved by motors that you can actually see in the joints. They don’t waste any resources trying to give him an expressive human-like face, something real robots have never done convincingly. Instead his head looks like a projector bolted right to his neck joint, along with a single monocular LIDAR camera lens for an eye.

And if that wasn’t good enough, he follows one of the hallmarks of modern robot design; his legs. He’s got bird legs, and flat feet. Legs like this are way easier to make than human-type legs, and the bulk of modern bipedal robot designs use them.

Sadly I can’t gush about Vasco all day because our company has company in the form of PIRATES. So it’s time to gear up and…

Ahem. Excuse me, Todd? Why is there a digital screen on this gun?

You should never put digital screens on field or emergency equipment because if the screen cracks, you suddenly can’t see anything anymore. And a firefight in space is both a field and an emergency situation. This is why the scientific community keeps making fun of Elon Musk for trying to make iPad controlled cars and spacecraft, and you should make fun of him for it too.

Thankfully the guns in Starfield only seem to use screens for the ammo count, so if the screen breaks that thankfully doesn’t stop the gun from firing. So you’ve got a pass for now Todd, but you’re on thin ice.

The pirates are here and they seem angry for no discernible reason, the Crimson Fleet likely doesn’t employ any counselors. I would ask them about what they’re feeling or if their ship’s thrusters work by magnetically accelerating helium plasma, but the tutorial kills them all before I get the chance. Questions for later then.

With that done and dusted we get our highly merchandisable watch, our spaceship, and our new BFF companion Vasco, and we blast off to deal with the pirates at their headquarters.

Part 2: The Ol’ Spacedusty Trail

Now that we’ve legally appropriated a spaceship, the game’s stellar sandbox really opens up. Or it would if we weren’t immediately under attack by pirate ships. This gives you your first taste of ship combat, which is incredibly realistic in that it sucks and I’m bad at it.

Controlling this thing takes some getting used to, and several skill points invested to be good at. This somewhat intentional jank might not be friendly game design, but it’s certainly scientifically accurate.

These ships are moving very fast in straight lines, meaning that it actually should take time and effort to get them to turn. When turning you can actually see thrusters all over the ship’s surface firing in the needed direction. For example, turn left and the thrusters on the right side of the ship fire to push you that way. Furthermore the ship actually continues to travel in a straight line at constant speed when left alone, which is exactly how its momentum should work in space.

Before we head to pirate HQ though, I actually want to glance at the map real quick. The scanners actually show lots of good details about all the planets and moons you can land on, namely their temperatures, gravity levels relative to Earth’s, and atmosphere. But there’s a neat hidden detail on the map itself, namely this bending gradient effect underneath the solar system map. See how it bends and dips under the stars and planets?

This is a reference to how these objects bend spacetime to create their gravity, and visuals a lot like this are used to show and teach how this works. This definitely isn’t measuring the bend of spacetime because the stars at the center of each system should be bending spacetime WAY MORE than this picture implies, but it is a neat artistic detail.

We land on Planet Pirate Kreet, ready to begin very amicable negotiations that will be mutually beneficial for all parties. But before that we actually unlock scanning, the task of crawling all over a planet to survey data on all the resources and lifeforms found there. This is potentially the most scientific thing you can do in the game, because at its most basic science is literally doing stuff, making observations, and writing them down.

Apparently the pirates are holed up in an abandoned facility of some kind, and this place is filled to the brim with loot in grand Bethesda RPG tradition. Unfortunately a problem starts to emerge in that the bulk of the random items you can find lying around are useless trash or decorations.

I mention this because it flies directly contrary to Bethesda’s immediately previous releases, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, where the random trash actually serves a purpose. In those games you could very scientifically make a gun or gun parts by taping together a dead squirrel and a megaphone, but in Starfield the tape does literally nothing.

Thankfully there is some usable loot in here. You got ammo, medicine, money, r-…red flags.

Actually as gross as they look, these first hostile aliens aren’t as bad as I thought.

A terminal entry calls these heatleeches and apparently they’re a type of common pest in this universe. They literally subsist on thermal energy and so commonly infest ship thrusters to feed on the heat they give off. I just find this a cool world building detail, and its nice to see some creature design that isn’t just a big stompy monster that kills you to death.

Oh by the way, this facility was apparently a research station designed to study and weaponize big stompy monsters to kill you to death, and their biggest stompiest monster escaped and killed everyone to death because OF COURSE IT DID.

Please note that this was an incredibly stupid idea in-universe that was never going to work. Humans haven’t even succeeded in controlling and weaponizing Earth based big predators, why would you ever think you could pull it off with aliens? Creatures with vastly different biological requirements and psychology?

Seriously, look at Earth’s history, we’ve never domesticated a big carnivore. No pet lions, tigers, or bears; only herbivores and small carnivores. Turning wolves into dogs is our biggest success story in that regard, and it only worked because we literally bred the murder out of them and replaced it with floppy ears and a need for belly rubs.

Surprisingly we don’t actually have to fight the monster. YET. Instead all we’re here for is to make our way to the roof and deal with the pirate captain, who shockingly does not want to see reason. However they forgot that I’m a scientist, meaning I can make anything explode if I try hard enough, and that Vasco was not programmed with a sense of mercy.

Part 3: The Best Part

No more pirates are left to stand between us and the rest of the game, now truly allowing the sandbox to open up. You are still strongly encouraged to head to Whiterun New Atlantis in order to meet up with the rest of Constellation, which I would recommend. The city offers tons of quests and shops, Constellation offers resources and traveling companions, and you can now access my favorite part of the game: ship building.

A few caveats aside, I really like the ship system. In terms of scientific fidelity, I like that the game specifically mentions your ship’s mass rather than its weight. While gravity does exist in space, your ship wouldn’t weigh much when floating out in the void far away from a star or planet. But being weightless doesn’t mean that a tiny baby thruster will effectively drive a giant ship. Newton’s Second Law says force equals mass times acceleration, meaning it takes more force to accelerate more mass. Hence needing stronger thrusters based on the ship’s mass, even if weight changes based on what planet you’re on.

It’s also just fun to build ships. The system isn’t perfect and there are some weird restrictions with how you can place the pieces but you can still make some fun and clever designs. At this early stage in the game I spent hours designing a sea turtle ship simply because I wanted to.

That said there is a major nitpick with this system; part availability.

Certain ship parts can only be used if you have certain skill levels and perks, which are a pain to level up. But worse still, in universe there are about four different ship manufacturers, and you can only buy specific parts from specific brands based on what planet you’re on. If you want Deimos brand parts, you’ve got to head to a Deimos brand staryard.

This is certainly realistic, a Toyota dealership isn’t going to be too keen on selling Chevrolet parts. But it is definitely a player hostile design choice, forcing players to jump between planets with an incomplete ship just to get specific parts when all they want to do is build a giant metal turtle.

Or alternatively, you can download a mod that makes every basic part available at every port. Thanks Nexus!

And now that our ship is perfected, we’re ready to blast off into the field to unravel the mystery of these artifacts!

1 Hour Later…

And I’m bored.

Huh.

Conclusion: Back Down To Earth

It’s entirely possible that I burned myself out on ship building. I spent upwards of 8 hours just trying designs for loads of things like boats and trains and other animals before settling on my turtle. But then there was the time I had to spend outside of the ship editor, engaging with the game’s systems to get what I needed to build the ship. And it’s in those outings that the cracks really started to form.

First I needed money for parts. The quickest ways to get money are questing and selling scanner data. There are only so many main and side questions, and completing them isn’t guaranteed to give money or go quickly. So your best option for quick paying quests are the mission boards.

These things will spit out an infinite number of random radiant jobs, in grand Bethesda style. And given that Starfield’s dungeons are mainly repetitive facilities on abandoned planets, they get samey fast.

You can also make good money selling planet scan data, but this is neither a fast nor fun process. To fully scan a planet you need to scan every single raw material and geological feature that planet has at least once, in addition to scanning every plant and animal present up to 8 times. And most of Starfield’s planets are flat wilderness with no quick or interesting ways to traverse them. So you’ll be running on foot for hours searching uninteresting terrain hoping to not get mauled by xenomorph dinosaurs while looking for just one more gonkceratops.

This made getting the money for my ship a slog, but once the money was in hand the slog wasn’t over. In order for my ship to be any good I needed better parts, which required more levels in the relevant piloting and ship building skills to even be able to see said parts in the shop menu. So then it was back to the mission board looking for XP and jobs that would level up the specific skills needed.

By the end of this I was happy with my ship, but in the process I had lost the drive to keep playing. And I don’t like that I feel that way.

I have logged a completely normal and healthy number of hours into Bethesda RPG’s. Steam alleges I’ve got a lump sum of 2000 hours adding together Skyrim and the Bethesda Fallout titles. I’m clearly hooked on the Bethesda RPG formula, but this world ain’t doing it for me.

I really do enjoy all the wonderful sciencey goodness in Starfield, but there’s something wrong here even beyond all the technical and game design issues. I think this setting lacks a certain spark that the rest of the Bethesda catalog leverages to keep people playing. The other games are flawed buggy messes too, but their worlds have a life to them that Starfield doesn’t seem to.

I don’t think the realistic sci-fi angle is what’s holding the game back in this regard, you can make fun and compelling realistic sci-fi. The Martian is proof positive of that. But stories like that require interesting characters, locales, and things to do.

None of the characters I met in my time with the game I would call fascinating or over-the-top in a way that made me want to spend time with them. No Heimskrs, no Nick Valentines. All the people in this setting feel very subdued, very ‘this is life and I’m doing my job’. And all the locales feel samey, either clean space stations or rocky barren planetoids. Even becoming the Mandalorian or a space wizard didn’t liven it up enough for me to want to keep going.

I hope Bethesda can find this new series’ spark at some point between updates and sequels. And I know the mods for this game are going to get crazy once the mod tools release. But for now I’ll be putting Starfield down, hopeful to revisit this sciencey sandbox in the future.

Hmm…I wonder if anything interesting is going on over in the Fallout community.

Thank you so much for reading, I hope you had fun and learned something! If you liked this then maybe you’ll like some of my other articles too. And make sure to come back for more quality edutainment!

Starfield is the property of Bethesda Softworks, referenced utilizing fair use.