I’ll try to link to all mods I mention here throughout, so you too can have a slightly better Starfield experience.
I have enjoyed many Bethesda open-world RPGs in my life. A handful of my favorites were Morrowind, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4.. And Starfield (initially) held my interest, too.
Most Bethesda RPGs really come into their own once the modders pick things up: These games are excellent platforms for creative 3rd parties to build unique, tailored experiences that can extend the framework and allow gamers to have the experience they want.
Unfortunately for Starfield the modding community never really took to it, and now?
Starfield is effectively dead, and it just hasn’t realized it yet.
Here’s a few reasons why.. But first: This is my first long-form piece for Nerfed Gamer, which is free of both paywalls AND (3rd party) advertising. Fuck that shit, right? Well, here’s one of two “house” ads: Maybe you’d consider buying a Nerfed Gamer t-shirt?
Additionally, here’s a warning: Some spoilers if you still haven’t played it yet. You’ve been warned.
Starfield - much like Cyberpunk 2077 - touted a rather ambitious game for the money. Exploration, play-it-your-way, countless worlds, a unique New Game+ experience and more were all parts of how the game was presented.
Unfortunately, the actual gameplay ended up with only about half of that ambition.
Sure, it was incredibly gorgeous. It had a fun ship-builder system. It was a brand-new IP. The soundtrack? It was absolutely chefs kiss good. And that NASA-punk aesthetic? Brilliantly done.
As you played, though, you felt like most of it was half-assed.
The worlds were barren. A lot of quests felt the same. Some systems were unfinished (melee combat became worse the further you progressed on release), and some were just poorly-implemented and a grind-fest (Starborn powers, Sky-err, Starfield’s version of shouts took forever to obtain, level up, and only a handful were actually useful).
Let’s expand on those last 2 a bit.
In the case of melee combat, thankfully an official patch finally added a proper modification and level scaling progression system. Some aspects, though, were a complete lost cause: Playing a melee stealth build was next to impossible, even with a perk that’s leveling-grind specifically requires melee stealth attacks.
For the Starborn powers? Those require you to grind out finding temples, running to them, doing an inane zero-G chase-the-sparkles “puzzle”, and then you get a random power (and hope it’s one you actually want). At least you don’t have to worry about duplicates in the same universe, which leads me to the next issue here: In order to “level up” these powers you need to repeat this all over again for every entry into New Game+. That’s just.. Ugh. Even with a mod that eliminates the “puzzle” portion this was such a horrible grind that my recent hop back into the universe made me decide to say fuck it, and after my first NG+ loop I just re-loaded my old level 136 save, installed a skill re-spec mod, and got back onto it.
Starborn powers were also partially saved by one really well-done mod that added a Starborn perk tree. Oh, and a mod that was left abandoned that no longer works as of writing this, which added something that should’ve been in the goddamned game from the beginning: A mod that shows the Starborn power you’ve got selected on the HUD.
Seriously, the fuck?
Essentially, there are 2 viable builds to take you into the late multi-New-Game-Plus game on high difficulties: Stealth Pistols, and Stealth Rifles.
That’s right, the stealth archer is in space, too.
Speaking of New Game Plus Yeah, it gives you a super-cool Starborn ship.. That has weapons that don’t even scale with any of the ship-based skills you’ve already invested in, requiring yet another mod so you can specialize in that Starborn ship’s unique armament.
NG+ was at least somewhat cleverly implemented, however.. Not without some extra work.
With each loop you can choose to repeat the main story (in a seamless experience), or tell everybody at the beginning that you’re essentially Space-Jesus, born again in a new universe.
While you do get new dialog options as part of replaying the story, the game actually chastises you via the storyline for doing so.
Of course, the more loops you do, the more likely you are to experience a unique universe.. Which usually means the folks at Constellation aren’t there in the entirety, and you get a small little “gotcha” beginning before just going on and doing the NG+ loop as if you selected “No” to replaying the story.
This would be fine if it wasn’t so goddamned rare to encounter a “unique” universe. I ended up installing a mod to increase the frequency of universe variants in Starfield, and finally got to see some. These were fun little diversions, overall, but most certainly not worth it taking 10+ NG+ runs before I saw my first (before installing that mod, of course).. And then I’d save-scum to try and see more, but after 20+ attempts I only saw 1 more.. Twice.
That’s why I needed that goddamned mod.
What about the world (well, universe(s)), though?
With such a massive universe, you’d assume each planet would have a lot going on.. Right?
Wrong.
Most systems and planets have random little points-of-interest: Stray caves, maybe a side quest or two, and some random encounters with spacers, pirates, or a guy trying to contact you regarding your ship insurance. Only a handful are actually “populated”, and I am using that word.. Loosely.
Each “major” settled system tends to have one planet with one small city, and that city tends to have a “theme”. You’ve got an old-west themed town, a modern neapolitan “utopia”, an underground city on Mars, and probably the worst, most offensively conceived location of all: Neon.
Neon is the “Cyberpunk”-themed city if it wasn’t blatantly fucking obvious from the name of it.
It’s also essentially just slightly-larger-than-normal oil rig on a giant water planet.
If that didn’t piss you off enough, it gets much fucking worse: The main part of the city is just a single short strip across the entire thing.. Oh, and that’s not all.
Literally every single goddamned main vendor bitches at you about bullshit when you first visit them. The weapons vendor has a quest for you to get back at a gang member for defacing his robot. One of the general merchants bitches about the other general merchant and wants you to get him to stop paying the exploitative protection dues. The Trade Authority (another general merchant who’s kinda like Wal-Mart but they will buy illegal goods) just bitches at you in general.
The worst (yes, it keeps getting worse) is the mining & materials vendor, who pass-agressively suggests a hero such as yourself might help fucking distribute flyers to save his business.
Yeah, and a lot of these quests are only dense in the sense that most of them were probably conceived by a writer’s 5-year-old.
The Ryujin questline is one dedicated for stealthy players, and is also centered in Neon.. And most of the starter quests are you literally just walking into restricted areas that aren’t actually restricted and plant/steal something. Seriously: Bethesda knows how to do trespassing systems in their games, but they didn’t even fucking bother for the first of these quests.
The questline gets better as you go, but honestly? It’s not redeemed, and I only bothered running it a couple times through my NG+ experiences.
There are some “better” questlines, though: The Vanguard questlines (there are two - the main Vanguard questline, and then the one where you get to infiltrate space pirates) are definitely good, even though the writing is pretty weak overall.
Overall, it’s a AA experience under a AAA coat of paint.. Which leads us into the usual savior of Bethesda titles: Mods.
Hey, remember how I said there were two “house” ads? Here’s the second: If you’ve enjoyed reading this thus-far, consider tipping me. I actually spent money on some of the mods I’ll be mentioning here, and unfortunately, I regret some of them.
All singleplayer Bethesda RPGs have one thing going for them: A devoted modding community.
Well, almost all.. Because Starfield’s is basically dead.
Nexus Mods - a modding community that has risen up to become the de-facto source for game mods - has very little going on in the Starfield section. There are a handful of decent ones that I’ve linked to already, and a handful more that I haven’t. Then you’ve got a bunch of Star Wars mods, a bunch of translations of those mods, and some mods that bring Cyberpunk 2077’s weapons into Starfield.
Speaking of Cyberpunk.. Starfield’s modding community is more like Neon compared to CP2077’s Night City. Despite being an older game with a rough launch, its mod community is still active and producing amazing stuff.
Why is this, though?
Well, aside from everything I listed in the previous section of this article, you may also find that Bethesda’s attempt to compete with the organic modding community is getting in the way in some ways.
Bethesda is no stranger to microtransactions; They introduced a paid horse armor mod for Oblivion, for fuck’s sake. However, that wasn’t enough for them: They then launched the Creation Club, which was it’s own modding platform.
Of course, it was way more limiting than Nexus Mods, but it did give them an excuse to do paid microtransactions.. As well as monetize other modders’ work. Here’s how it works: You buy credit packs (because of course you have to buy their special currency that’s only usable with Starfield). You can then use the credits you bought to buy mods. Some will be official mods (the Tracker Alliance, for example), while others will be by “Verified Creators”: 3rd party modders that Bethesda has approved to sell mods on the Creation Club.. As long as Bethesda gets their cut, of course.
The Tracker’s Alliance is particularly insidious: It’s a bounty hunter guild that initially implied you’d be getting more contracts released as mods down the road, but.. Well, it seems not yet, at least, despite it being almost a year and a half old now.
“The Vulture” was the only contract available, and it’s a paid Bethesda mod.. And not a particularly compelling one.
Shattered Space, the first “full” paid-DLC was.. Not worth it. This DLC has you basically experiencing Va’ruun culture, and while it has the scope of something like the Vanguard questline, it’s nowhere near as interesting. I actually ended up quitting mid-way through it, and only finally finished it recently as part of my re-acquaintence with the game to write this piece.
I will not be playing it again in NG+.
How about the paid 3rd party mods, though?
I tried a few, so let’s talk about them.
I myself have done modding for games previously. I appreciate the work that goes into crafting mods, and I want to make it clear here: I am in no way disparaging the work these mod authors have done. All of these mods are definitely high-quality, and while they may not quite have the polish of professional content, they are definitely quality mods, and I am happy to have given them a little bit of my money.
The first one I want to mention is the Watchtower mod, which is widely praised by folks who still play Starfield intentionally and not so they can write a bitch fest article like I am right now.
This one is ambitious: It adds a fleet combat system, is fully voiced, brings the mechs from the in-game lore to life in a big fucking way, and is generally really well done.
My only complaints? The level design (lighting, utilization of space, flow, direction) is pretty weak, and it also forces you into playing the first portion immediately once you meet the criteria for it.
I am glad I bought it, and I am glad I played it, but.. After the first run I uninstalled it, just so I could not be forced into it again.
Spend the money, but unless you want to re-play it each NG+ loop, uninstall it after.
The rest of the mods I played were actually weapon mods.
I tried a number of pistol mods for my first “welcome back” character to the game. The Astra-19 and Old Earth Pistol Collection were both well-designed, but had some balance issues (holy hell, those 1911 clones get expensive - even in your first run in the game).
As I played my new character, I knew I was going to end up quitting and switching to my old Stealth Sniper character, so I also picked up the Railgun Bundle.
This one I really liked, for the most part. While it was too easy to get these for free, it was pretty well balanced, and that sniper rifle? Yeah, it replaced the Hard Target for me in my old character, while also retaining solid balancing during late NG+ loops. My only gripe there was the highest-zoom scope was nearly useless in Starfield, given most engagements are at much closer range (I ended up sticking with the 6x scope on that one).
I also tossed on the Ward & Dunn SMG mod. Starfield’s full-auto weapons are effectively useless; at early levels you don’t have enough money to keep ammo in stock, and at later levels these weapons have no additional perks to make them viable damage-wise when compared to semi-auto firearms. This SMG? Yeah, it works.. Although, like all the others, it does have a balancing issue: It uses an incredibly hard to find ammo type, so keeping ammo in-stock will probably require additional mods or cheating to make effective use of this.
That’s it. After spending about $20 or so in mod credits, I was pretty much soured on the idea that paid 3rd party mods could save Starfield. I’d rather toss my money into another modders’ tip jar than rely on curated paid mods.
So, is Starfield saveable?
Ok, so not one weird trick, but.. Two.
First off: Bethesda needs to release a refactor of the game ASAP. Much like Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.0 redemption arc, Bethesda could absolutely take lessons learned from everything above and create a much better experience in Starfield.
This is.. Sorta being done. It seems they are at least revamping the space experience, but the rest?
Yeah, I’m not getting my hopes up.
An easier thing Bethesda could do, however, is work harder to encourage modders to keep creating good shit.
Provide mod bounties. Share mods that aren’t just on their own Creation Club, but also on the Nexus. Start modding contests.
If we get more modders expanding Starfield’s barren wasteland, we’ll have more people playing the damned game.
Oh, and for the love of fucking shit, please, Bethesda, add a proper re-spec system into the goddamned game.
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