Summary
- Starfield struggles with long playthroughs, as players have reported gamebreaking bugs and crashes at higher levels of New Game Plus.
- Despite its issues, Starfield still has merits that have drawn players to invest countless hours in the game.
- The game's technical issues, particularly related to save file data and FormIDs, have raised concerns within the modding community.
After over 591 hours of gameplay, a Starfield player is forced to say goodbye to their base of operations, hopeful that entering the Unity will fix the crashes that occur whenever they attempt to approach the outpost. While Starfield has a creative New Game Plus feature, the game itself seems to struggle with particularly long playthroughs. Its players have frequently reported strange, gamebreaking bugs at higher levels of New Game Plus – from turning invisible, to being stuck in a permanent time warp, and even having companions reference events that happened in a previous run.
While Starfield is a Bethesda sandbox through and through, it does have its issues that prevent it from reaching the universal acclaim of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles. Starfield currently has fewer players than Skyrim, and is the only major Bethesda title on Steam with a Mixed rating. Despite being delayed for a full year, many Bethesda fans feel that Starfield could have used more development time, as quite a significant number of its features lack depth. Despite the shortcomings, Starfield still has plenty of merits that have caused players to invest countless hours in the game.
Bethesda is Responding to Negative Starfield User Reviews
Bethesda is openly engaging with Steam players who left a negative review of the game, as Starfield's overall rating remains firmly Mixed.
Unfortunately for Mattgyvercom, their Starfield playthrough ran into an unfortunate bug. After spending hundreds of hours building an outpost in Starfield and decorating it, the game inexplicably crashes whenever they get close to it. The issue seems to occur on the Xbox Series X, and triggers solely at the outpost. Mattgyvercom attempted to troubleshoot the bug by traveling to other places on the planet, approaching the outpost manually, un-assigning cargo links, un-assigning companions, loading the save on the PC, building a second outpost, and even doing a hard reset of their console. The efforts were for naught, as the outpost kept crashing all the same.
Though the cause of the issue remains a mystery, the main suspect is the way FormIDs are handled by Starfield (as opposed to previous Bethesda titles). Namely, the dynamic FormIDs in the new Creation Engine take up more data than the old FormIDs of its predecessor. This means that during long playthroughs of Starfield, save files will experience a stack overflow, ultimately causing crashes when loading a save or fast traveling. As pointed out by X-2357 in the comments section of the thread, even a heavily modded Skyrim playthrough would take up less data than a vanilla Starfield run, which has caused a significant amount of concern in Starfield's modding community.
Ultimately, Starfield attempted to break free from the usual Bethesda mold by embracing systems such as procedural generation, and the developers should certainly be commended for it – even if it didn't entirely succeed. Though releasing Shattered Space was always in the cards, Bethesda still has around 250 employees working on Starfield, suggesting that the scope of its post-launch support will be even bigger than that of Skyrim. Hopefully, it will address some of these deeply-rooted technical issues, and allow the game to realize its full potential.
Starfield
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 85 /100 Critics Rec: 83%
WHERE TO PLAY
- Platform(s)
- PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
