Starfield – A Personal FAQ

Whenever I post about STARFIELD or share a screenshot from it, I frequently get a number of questions.

I think it’s because STARFIELD was an oddly divisive game. People have strong opinions about it, and then strong opinions about other people’s strong opinions.

I don’t have these strong opinions – while I enjoy the game a great deal, if you don’t like it, that’s fine, and there are lots and lots and lots of legitimate reasons to criticize Microsoft, which is the ultimate owner of STARFIELD. It’s possible for two things to be simultaneously true, that Microsoft has done a lot of sketchy things and STARFIELD is a good game that I enjoyed.

I suspect it’s a bit like enjoying a football game while at the same time knowing that the NFL is an unscrupulous cartel that could benefit from some thorough reforms.

Despite that, I have to admit that I don’t think it’s super healthy to make gaming opinions a core part of your identity. A game in the end is just a fancy toy for amusement in idle moments, and if God descended tomorrow and told me that STARFIELD would vanish from the face of the Earth, I’d be rather disappointed, but my dinner would still taste just as good and my house would be just as warm.

That said, I did enjoy the game quite a bit. Everyone needs a hobby. Even I can’t work every hour of every day, and I wrote like a 100 novels in the last ten years. Everyone has their own stresses in life, of course, but we seem to live in particularly stressful times these days. So a harmless hobby is a nice break from Real Life.

The game’s newest expansion comes out today April 7th, so with that in mind, I thought I would answer the most common questions I get whenever I post about STARFIELD.

Q: Did STARFIELD influence your SILENT ORDER science fiction series at all?

No. But I’m always pleased when I get this question, because it’s easily answered.

The final book of SILENT ORDER came out on September 4th, 2023, and STARFIELD came out on September 6th, 2023. I tried STARFIELD soon after it came out, but I didn’t actually start playing it in earnest until April of 2024.  So, no, STARFIELD was not an influence on SILENT ORDER. It would be fair to say that SILENT ORDER was more influenced by James Bond, some H.P. Lovecraft, and WING COMMANDER PRIVATEER (more on that below).

Q: What initially drew your interest to STARFIELD?

Part of the game reminded me a lot of WING COMMANDER PRIVATEER from the 90s, which was one of my favorite games back in the day.

If you’re not familiar with it, WING COMMANDER PRIVATEER was what’s now called a “space trading sim” set in the WING COMMANDER universe. In all the previous WING COMMANDER games, you played as a starfighter pilot fighting in the humans’ war against the catlike Kilrathi invaders. Your missions were assigned to you, along with the specific ship you would fly.

But in PRIVATEER, you played a freelance captain with a run-down freighter. You can carry cargo, go bounty hunting, do mercenary work, trading, and just wander around the map following infinite procedurally generated missions from the Mission Board, the Merchants’ Guild, and the Mercenaries’ Guild. Eventually you would have enough cash to upgrade your run-down ship to something better and configure it however you liked. There’s a main plot, but you can totally ignore it and do whatever you want.

I loved PRIVATEER, and I finished both it and the expansion, and of course spent a lot of time doing the infinite procedurally generated quests.

STARFIELD does the same thing, but with thirty years’ advancement worth of game design and technology improvements. In grand Bethesda game tradition, don’t even have to do any of the main plotlines. You can just wander around doing procedurally generated quests. It’s like PRIVATEER, but better, and with ground-based quests as well. You can get out of your ship and walk around in a way you couldn’t in PRIVATEER. In STARFIELD, you can land at some random Science Outpost or Industrial Outpost, and the inhabitants will have a quest for you.

I’ve heard STARFIELD described as a “cozy game”, since quite a few people enjoy just building their outposts and their ships and decorating them like the science fiction version of Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley.

In another sense, I suppose STARFIELD could be described as “cozy adventure”. Granted, that might be a strange thing to say about missions where you machine gun Space Pirates, blow up their base, and loot all their stuff, but STARFIELD is an excellent game for just puttering around. It’s fun after a long day to play for an hour, take out some Space Pirates, upgrade your ship a little, maybe tinker with your outpost.

(I do like the main plotline and the various faction quests.)

Q: So the procedural generation stuff doesn’t bother you?

No. Procedural generation been part of gaming forever and long before the civilizational blight that is modern LLM systems. Certainly there are points where the procedural generation in STARFIELD could be improved, and it has been improved with patches, but I enjoy the randomness of it.

Q: If you think STARFIELD is good, why did it have such mixed reviews?

It did have some rough points at launch (the lack of surface vehicles and city maps, and some weird choices for inventory management, among other things), though those were later patched.

I honestly think the game is better than the mixed reviews, and I also think the mixed reviews were a combination of different converging social factors. Specifically, people’s expectations of what they imagined the game would be versus what it actually was, its Xbox/PC exclusivity, and the unfortunate addiction to Outrage Culture in social media. We live in stressful times, and for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this post, I think people are overall angrier and eager to lash out when a target presents itself, especially online.

Additionally, I suspect a big part of the mixed reviews is that Microsoft has built up a lot of ill-will since the launch of Windows 11 and Copilot, and STARFIELD is a convenient outlet. Like, Outlook and Teams are widely hated software tools, probably some of the most hated software tools in the world, but your job forces you to use them and you can’t do anything about it. It’s more effective to criticize a consumer-facing business like video games than it is Outlook and Teams, since those tend to be sold in blocks of thousands of licenses to large institutional customers that don’t particularly care what their employees think about Outlook and Teams.

(Fun fact: before I finished typing this post, Outlook was causing problems on NASA’s first manned mission to the moon in over fifty years.)

Q: You’ve said repeatedly that you don’t like multiverse stuff, yet STARFIELD’s main plot revolves heavily around the multiverse.

That’s true. I don’t really like multiverse stuff in fiction because it’s hard to execute well without making the story pointless. If there are a billion parallel universes and somebody dies in one of them so what? Just hop over one universe and find a new version of the dead guy. Multiverse and parallel universe plotlines are a bit like homemade lasagna or homemade spaghetti carbonara – it needs to be made by someone who really, really knows what they’re doing, otherwise the end result is sad and unpleasant, indigestible, or outright disgusting.

That said, multiverse as a game mechanic is a clever idea.

Like, we all know that if you really like a game, you’re going to play it more than once. How many times have you replayed SKYRIM? How many uncounted quintillions of times has the original SUPER MARIO BROTHERS been replayed? STARFIELD rather cleverly builds that replaying into the game. You can start over in a new universe and play the game again, but this time your character has in-game foreknowledge of everything that’s going to happen, and that can affect the gameplay in fun ways.

Q: Did you really lose 40 pounds while playing STARFIELD?

Yes. Of course, the main factor was some lifestyle changes in terms of exercise and diet, but I did lose 40 pounds since starting to seriously playing STARFIELD in April of 2024. The game was an excellent distraction instead of late-night snacking, so I suppose I sublimated the snacking urge into blowing up Space Pirates.

Q: Aren’t you worried STARFIELD will influence or slow down your writing?

Well, writers and other creatives draw inspiration from all sorts of places. But, no, I’m not worried about that because STARFIELD draws so heavily on multiverse tropes and I don’t really like multiverse stuff.

In terms of productivity, I published a million new words in 2024 and again in 2025.

Though in full disclosure, I will be surprised if I hit a million words in 2026 due to the amount of Real Life stuff I will have to do this year, but admittedly that is Real Life stuff unconnected to gaming or recreation.

Q: Did playing STARFIELD so much take time away from reading?

Probably not. In 2025 I read 69 books, and by the end of March in 2026 I had read 15. Lots of people read more than I do, but 69 books in a year is still significantly higher than the American national average.

In all honesty, I both read less and play fewer video games now than I did like twenty years ago when I had way fewer responsibilities.

Q: The expansion pack SHATTERED SPACE got mixed reviews, but you really enjoyed it. Why?

I thought the concept was intriguing. “Religious leader builds machine to contact his conception of God and accidentally blows up half his capital city and creates space-time rift” is an interesting concept for both a game and for fiction. I also liked how the expansion pack went in-depth into the Crazy Space Cultists’ home planet, which was a fun environment to play.

SHATTERED SPACE is definitely STARFIELD on hard mode, though! The game recommends it for Level 35 characters, but I think 50 might be better.

Q: If STARFIELD was a commercial failure, why do you play it?

Well, “commercial success” and “I enjoyed this” don’t necessarily overlap, do they? Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it is good, and just because something is unpopular doesn’t mean it is bad.

That said, I don’t think it’s objectively correct to say STARFIELD was a commercial failure, regardless of one’s opinion of the game. Microsoft is a ruthless corporate empire that has absolutely no qualms about cutting things that are liabilities, especially as more and more of its resources go into Copilot and LLM slop (though there are some indications that its AI focus is starting to loosen as reality begins to impose itself on the grand delusion of the AI-powered future). Considering that in the two and a half years since STARFIELD came out it’s received a lot of patches, a lot of new free content, and two paid expansions, it’s clear that the Lidless Eye of Microsoft has not turned toward STARFIELD in fiery wrath, especially since Microsoft laid off lots of people and shut down a bunch of its game studios during that time.

People tend to focus on Steam rankings, but that’s only a segment (if a large segment) of the market. Various STARFIELD devs in interviewers have said that the game is in the top 10 for played hours on Xbox Game Pass, and Xbox Game Pass is really important to Microsoft, probably more important than the physical Xbox itself. So I don’t think it’s objectively true that STARFIELD is a commercial failure, though it definitely wasn’t as successful as SKYRIM or FALLOUT 4.

Q: BALDUR’S GATE 3 came out at about the same time as STARFIELD. Did you like STARFIELD better than BALDUR’S GATE 3?

Yes.

Q: What?!? Why? Everyone knows BG3 is the better game!

BG3 is an excellent game – well-written, well-designed, excellent voice acting, the works.

That said, I also think STARFIELD is an excellent game, and I just enjoyed it more.

It’s a matter of taste, I think, which is not quantifiable. BG3 is a big Larian/Bioware-style narrative RPG, which is its own kind of genre of game the way that “Bethesda RPG” is also its own genre. I mentioned above that I enjoy the “puttering around” aspect of STARFIELD a great deal, and BG3 doesn’t offer as much space for that kind of puttering. Some, but not nearly as much.

I have enjoyed that style of narrative RPG in the past – DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS and KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC were both excellent games that I played back-to-back in 2009 (I had more time for that kind of thing back then), and I think they qualify as direct predecessors to BG3. But these days I like the freedom of puttering more even if a game like BG3 offers an excellent interactive narrative.

Additionally, I admit I got frustrated a lot with BG3 in a way I didn’t with STARFIELD. In BG3 I frequently kept running into Total Party Kill situations, which is exasperating after you’ve sunk twenty minutes into a complicated combat encounter.

So I think it’s objectively and quantifiably true to say that BG3 is significantly more popular than STARFIELD, but on the subjective level I just enjoy STARFIELD more.

Q: Do you like the soundtrack of STARFIELD?

Oh yeah. It’s some of my favorite writing music. For fun, go on YouTube and watch the London Symphony Orchestra’s concert of the STARFIELD soundtrack. The composer Inon Zur gets to conduct some of it.

I’d say my favorite tracks are Into The Starfield (Main Theme), New Atlantis, The Safety Of The Citizens, Freestar, The New Old Frontier (that plays in the Trackers’ Alliance HQ), Cydonia, Sublevels, Neon, and In Silent Orbit. The battle music when you fight the Starborn is pretty great as well, I think it’s called “Stars & Sacrifice” but I’m not 100% sure.

(I also quite like the soundtrack for BG3 as well, to return to an earlier question – Andrew Wincott totally deserved the BAFTA for “Raphael’s Final Act.”)

Q: If a Switch 2 port comes along of STARFIELD, will you buy it?

I would wait for reviews, but honestly, I would be amazed if there was a Switch 2 port of STARFIELD. The Switch 2 is more powerful than its predecessor, but there’s no denying that STARFIELD is a chunky, chunky game.

Then again, I wouldn’t have thought that it was possible to get CYBERPUNK 2077, WITCHER 3, or FALLOUT 4 on the Switch 2, and apparently those are good ports, so I guess we’ll see.

Q: Favorite quest in STARFIELD?

The Mantis, Groundpounder, and the entire thing with the Terrormorphs. Also the whole freaky quest with the Crucible and the clones, that was some great 70s-style science fiction stuff. I enjoy any of the quests with Walter Stroud because he’s a fun character, and also voiced by the actor who played Quark in DEEP SPACE NINE in the nineties, back when I was playing PRIVATEER. (Full circle moment!) Also fighting The Hunter for the last time is pretty great since he’s such a smug Nietzschean jerk.

(One of the greatest moments in the game is how The Hunter is just chilling in a spaceport bar and willing to have amiable conversations with you at the start of the game since he’s killed alternate versions of you thousands of times before and isn’t expecting trouble, so no reason not to have a civil chat over a drink.)

I’ve also played through the new Trackers’ Alliance plotline. If you get the premium edition of STARFIELD and its bonus 1000 Creation Credits, I highly recommend you use them on the Trackers’ Alliance expansion. It’s a lot of fun.

Q: Favorite ship?

The Razorleaf and the Ecliptic Claymore. Also, this is a new addition, but I really like the Orchid you pick up from the fake Mantis quest in the Trackers’ Alliance quest line. I think my favorite overall ship is the Shieldbreaker that you can buy on New Atlantis. But if you’re going to buy a ship instead of stealing it, I think Walter’s company Stroud-Ecklund (see above) has the best ships.

Honestly, one of my favorite activities in STARFIELD is stealing ships from Space Pirates. It’s always so much fun.

Q: Favorite gun?

The Magstorm, hands down. Peace through superior firepower! The Magstorm is what I used for the final battle with The Hunter and then again in the final mission for SHATTERED SPACE.

For stealth, the Hard Target with a suppressor and a scope. I’ve taken out entire pirate bases with the Hard Target in stealth mode. The one Starborn lady who sells stuff to you in new universes has a really excellent stealth-optimized version of the Hard Target in her inventory.

I also really like the Urban Eagle pistol you get early in the Vanguard plotline, since it’s usually the best gun in the game I’ve found to that point.

CONCLUSION

I hope that explains why I enjoy STARFIELD, and answers some the questions people have whenever I mention it.

I doubt anyone involved with STARFIELD will ever read this, but I would like to thank everyone who has worked on the game in any capacity – devs, artists, writers, composers, Q&A people, everyone.

Thank you all for your hard work, which has given me a lot of enjoyment and mental escape during some very stressful times.

-JM