The video game Starfield has been in development for eight years and was announced in 2018. After the failure of Fallout 76, expectations have been mixed on whether or not Starfield would be a good game.

The game is one of the best I have played in years. Even with its flaws it is worth playing. 

The specs for PC aren’t great for an older generation PC. People who use something like an Nvidia RTX3090 for a graphics card are going to be disappointed playing the game and using a 4K monitor because the recommended specs are for an Nvidia RTX4090 or the AMD Radeon7900, which are extremely expensive graphics cards. Though I don’t have an Nvidia RTX4090, I do have an RTX3050. Because I own a lower end  graphics card, I used lower settings. My PC shouldn’t have trouble with the frame rate, but I have had huge frame rate drops especially around big cities. The game will go from 60FPS (frames per second) to 10FPS in a matter of seconds. The graphics are impressive but some of the textures don’t load in like they should. This might be my monitor seeing how it is an old monitor. This isn’t including the other computer parts such as the RAM or the CPU. All of this tends to add up in price and this isn’t good for people who are using a budget build PC. 

I put around five hours in and the game is probably one of the best on the market right now. The game runs smoothly on PC, for the most part. The frame rate drops in most of the big cities and there are a few visual glitches, like in the cutscene of my ship landing sometimes I can see my ship through the ground. Another common visual glitch is the characters facing away when they’re talking to you, which I admit is hilarious, but my favorite was when I had finished a round of combat and an enemy went flying.

 The gameplay is amazing. I love the combat. Each weapon feels unique. Every situation forces me to strategize, such as finding the best cover in a tricky scenario. 

The role playing aspects are one of the best things about the game. My favorite example so far is the mission where you’re introduced to the Free Star Rangers. The mission goes that there is a bank in a city being held up by some robbers and the Free Star Rangers are trying to save hostages trapped in the bank. The leader of the Rangers asks you to go talk to the bank robbers and depending on how it goes you can negotiate with the bank robbers or it can go where you can go in and take out all of the bank robbers but depending on the weather or not your positioning is good or bad the hostages may not make it out. The game has tension in almost every level that requires role playing.

Space combat is amazing. I feel that I am really in space and that the enemy ships are really there. It’s a lot of fun to just go and learn techniques to ship combat. It’s probably one of the most realistic ways ship combat has been implemented in video games. Strategizing in video games is so under used and more games need to learn from this. 

It’s not a surprise from a AAA developer that the game is as good as it is. This game is  the best example of how Bethesda has done so well over the years and I am really excited to see what they do in the future.