Starfield

Spaceship interiors in Starfield, as well as interiors of space stations, look very believable, made with attention to details. With high quality graphics and textures almost look like a render of real spaceship. Too bad spaceship is just fast travel location with extra loot storage. It's not even good hub location. There's seems to be fuel mentioned somewhere, but you never have to refuel. Fuel capacity just limits distance of single gravjump, then fully replenishes. No wonder people spending thousands on Star Citizen, players craving detailed space travel simulators. Starfield is too casual. The only realistic thing there is that you need to undock before making gravjump. But eventually this just becomes annoying.

Would have been weird not to have space flight in a game built around space exploration, so naturally Starfield had to have that. Unfortunately, space flights in the game are superficial. You can't really travel anywhere in space. When you travel to a planet, it's just a fast travel to a tiny location with 360 degree skybox and invisible walls. You can't fly to another planet, can't even fly a bit closer to the planet you are currently orbiting. Of course all the key aspects of space flights are technically there: docking to a space stations, shooting at other space ships, fast travel using something called gravjump. Also it's possible to survey the planets for resources, to mine them when you land. Never mined any resources in 2 playthroughs. That sounds even more boring than all side missions in the game. One of the most disappointing things in a game about space is dead sky. Skybox in space is just a picture, stars are drawn, no shimmering at all.

Visually Starfield is exceptionally good: hi-res textures, models, lipsync and facial animation in general. Very admirable achievement for a game engine as old as gamedev industry itself. Extra credit for level design - those underground compounds, space bases and spaceships - are believable and fun to explore. The rest unfortunately is inherited from previous Bethesda games: animations, visual effects, NPC AI and cut-scenes came directly from early 2000s.

Starfield is looking surprisingly good, next level of visuals for Bethesda.

Bethesda’s Starfield launching November 11, 2022 exclusively on Xbox Series X/S and PC