Starfield

There is a genuinely excellent forty-hour game inside Starfield and it is not the one on the box. It is the Ryujin Industries corporate espionage line, the Crimson Fleet betrayal arc, and the parts of New Atlantis where someone clearly cared. Everything between those is loading screens and grey rock.

Bethesda's strength was never the map

The studio's reputation rests on the accident of exploration — cresting a hill in Skyrim and finding something handmade. Starfield removes the hill. Planets are generated, points of interest repeat verbatim within the first fifteen hours, and travel is a menu rather than a journey. You do not walk anywhere. You fast travel to a tile, walk four hundred metres across it, and fast travel out.

Remove that accident and what remains is the quest design, which is stronger than the studio usually gets credit for. The faction lines here are the best Bethesda has written since Morrowind, and the corporate one in particular has a stretch of non-lethal infiltration that no other game in this genre would attempt.

Distinct planets landed on

Around 40

Identical abandoned facilities entered

At least 12

Hours before I stopped exploring

22

New Game Plus is the real design

The plot's ending pushes you into a loop, and the loop is where the writing is boldest — later runs let you skip, subvert or short-circuit the story in ways that acknowledge repetition rather than ignoring it. It is a smart idea, executed with more nerve than the eighty hours preceding it.

It also arrives far too late for most people, and it strips your ship, your gear and your relationships to get there.

Where it slips

Everywhere between the good parts. Ship building is deep and almost never necessary. Outposts are a full crafting economy the game never asks you to use. The persuasion minigame reduces every negotiation to a slot machine. And the loading screen count over seventy-four hours is genuinely absurd — landing, entering a building, entering a lift, all separate.

Loading screens, rough count

Over 900

Outposts built

1, then never revisited

The verdict

Play the faction quests. Skip the planets. That is not a workaround, it is the honest way to get value out of this — around forty hours of good-to-excellent content wrapped in thirty hours of nothing.

The score is low not because the game is bad but because it insists on being enormous when it had no reason to be.