It started with a couple of mechanics... then it drastically grew as more and more players got access to the game. This page more or less covers the many grievances a lot of Spacefarers have had in their adventures throughout the vast Starfield.
Due to the number of examples applying to powers/mechanics gained through completing the main quest, Spoilers Are Off for this page. You have been warned.
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Story and Characters
- Bethesda's decision to permanently kill off a human Constellation companion during the main quest is questionable on several levels. For one, there are only four of them to begin withnote , one of which is a single father to a young daughter, and another may be a surrogate mother to a different young girl. Either one of them or a third companion might be your lover/spouse. Who ends up dying is determined solely by their affinity toward you, and no, it's not the one who likes you least; it's the one who likes you most. The whole thing forces you to juggle Relationship Valuesnote in a desperate attempt to pass the buck to the companion you consider expendable... which means you must spend a lot of time with someone you may not like, while keeping your distance from those you do like. Even if you like all or none of the companions, you might still want to save the ones who have kids at least. And just to rub salt in the wound, losing a companion this way serves no tangible purpose story-wise other than establishing the bad guys. That being said, depending on what path you take for the ending you can prevent this from happening on your next time loop, preventing any death on your companion's side. This can also permanently limit and handicap your run. Sarah Morgan is the first human companion you get and the only one you get in a set order. She's also probably on your ship because she boosts it and is also one of two female romance options. All of this means she's likely the companion in the most danger on the Eye. Her death also means the loss of her "free plus one crew" skill. Whoever dies, there is no 1-for-1 replacement for them as crew and if you haven't finished their personal quests, those are gone. All and all, it's a gutpunch to players by design, but one that goes so far to force excessively frustrating gameplay consequences as well.
- New Game Plus has received some criticism. If you choose to go through the Unity at the end of the main quest, you'll re-start in another universe. All that transfers is your character's level, skills, and unlocked research. Ship(s), inventory, credits, character relationships, outposts, etc... are all lost. That's all fine and dandy, but the problem comes that there's multiple New Game Plus, each subsequent one upgrading the special armor (up to rank 10 at the 10th instance of new game plus), powers (again up to rank 10), and ship (up to rank six). This encourages players to just not get invested into starting a proper new game plus because they'll have to ditch all their progress 10 times in a row anyway, and instead just grind their new game progress, only bothering to get involved again once they'd done it 10 times and the game's run out of incentives to go through the unity. Some new outlets
have pointed out that NG+ being a series of grind runs counter to the other mechanics where the game wants you to get invested by building outposts, custom ships, companion relationships, etc...
Engine and UI/UX
- The "zooming uncomfortably close to you during a conversation" UI returns with a vengeance from the 17 year-old (at the time of Starfield's release) Oblivion, despite Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas toning down the zooming to a more reasonable level just a few years later. Skyrim merely centers the camera to the conversation NPC while Fallout 4 follows, with camera changing to whoever speaks. Any of those options seem better than Starfield's by comparison.
- Similarly, if an NPC is in the middle of one of their "idle actions", you won't be able to engage in conversation with them. Vladimir is a prime example with his "book reading" animation, as it takes several seconds to end and, if you miss the brief window between when he finishes it to talk to him, he might start it right back up.
- The inventory is decried as being awkward to navigate, it's very difficult to just compare stats between two weapons, and involves juggling not only the player's on-person inventory, but also their ship cargo when dealing with traders which can be awkward. As has been the case for past Bethesda titles, it appears to have been designed with console players in mind and is even more awkward to PC players.
- The town maps being topographical dot maps of the area, and only showing broader districts instead of streets and buildings, has been roundly critcized, with many comparing it unfavorably to the maps in Skyrim (itself, without mods, was criticized for lacking details like roads for the world map, and poorly labelled and zoomed in for the local map) from over a decade before, which had much more detail. Players who haven't gotten used to an area's layout enough to remember where every business is are in for a rough time.
- The unkillable "Essential" NPCs return from previous Bethesda RPGs and remain as frustrating as ever, especially in comparison to contemporary games like Baldur's Gate III and The Outer Worlds, which give you the freedom to blow up questlines to take out hated NPCs if you really want to. Most companions also hate it when you take a bullet to the head of not actively hostile NPCs, too, no matter how unforgivably awful they might be. Some specific examples:
- A particularly obnoxious example of this is the CEO of Paradiso, who casually suggests genocide as a solution to the "problem" posed by the ECS Constant arriving in orbit around the planet; many players will want to take a gun to him right there, but he's tagged essential and there is no solution to the questline beyond one of the compromises fielded in the meeting. Compared to what BG3 or TOW might let you do in such a place, it's extremely frustrating and can make one wonder about the narrative message of the quest.
- Another potentially frustrating example of this is Mathis, from the Crimson Fleet line. As soon as you're separated from Delgado by the cave-in, Mathis proposes turning on Delgado and killing him - but you can't shoot Mathis for suggesting such a stupid thing (as a die-hard Delgado supporter might want to), and worse you can't even just turn him over to Delgado. You either pretend it didn't happen and let Mathis join the Fleet, or you turn him down and he tries to ambush you and get revenge later.
- Many are describing Benjamin Bayu as the new Maven Black-Briar, complete with the inability to do anything about him and his criminal enterprise, whether a storyline or "bullet the head" solution.
- It's been pointed out that this mechanic makes even less sense since the game is based around visiting multiple alternate time lines, meaning killing essential NPCs shouldn't really matter when there's an alternate reality where they are fine right around the corner.
Vendors and Item Storage
- Smuggling contraband is a fairly deep feature with several unique mechanics. Unfortunately, engaging with it just isn't worth the hassle, let alone the investment in the special ship modules you need to enable proper smuggling in the first place. Contraband is almost impossible to acquire reliably, being mostly found as unique loot that doesn't respawnnote , so kiss your dreams of becoming Starfield's Han Solo goodbye. If you happen to find contraband, the money you can make from selling it is pocket change past the early game (most legal merchandise is more valuable), but because merchants have so little cash on them, you usually still need to sneak past at least one cargo scan to sell all of itnote . Another option is join (and remain friends with) the Crimson Fleet, whose headquarters offers several contraband-buying merchants, but isn't exactly a moral choice to make. There's also only a single fence in each hub city and they're most often found behind multiple area transitions and loading screens... Long story short, unless the whole system gets a serious balance overhaul, you're better off leaving contraband where you found it and lug some more looted guns and armor back to the nearest vendor instead.
- The much maligned merchant cash limit returns from previous Bethesda games. However, in Starfield, the limit is felt more severely. First, because unlike its immediate single-player predecessor Fallout 4, there's no alternative ways to dispose of gear. You can't scrap it for parts, strip the mods, or even "disenchant" special qualities like in Skyrim. Second, unlike those games where its easy to acquire a ton of money with little to spend it on, Starfield has a giant Money Sink — Starships. This means players are incentivized to sell their loot to keep the funds coming in. Third, Starfield's encumbrance system is far more severe and players can rapidly find themselves and their ships overburdened. (Unlike Fallout 4 where settlement inventories were unlimited, good for storing tons of resources, your ship's cargo hold will fill up fast.) Unfortunately, merchants typically don't have more than 5k on themselves on average, with the most wealthy of them capping out around 10k. In the mid-game, tier-two "Calibrated" guns and spacesuits can sell from 1k to 2k each. With tiers three-five (Refined, Advanced, Superior) fetching all a merchant has, or sometimes even more than their maximum. Merchants do reset after 24~48 hours, but waiting in Starfield is annoyingly slow, forcing you to sit there as each hour ticks down. Waiting for 24 hours (the maximum in one sitting) can take about 30 real-life seconds. Also, unlike Fallout 4 and Skyrim, you cannot invest in a merchant to raise their maximum funds, or attract wealthier merchants to your outposts.
- Limited storage space in player-built containers. The game doesn't let you disassemble equipment for crafting components, doesn't let you sell it off easily because the merchants have low cash on hand (especially once you hit the late-game where single weapons can be worth double what even the wealthiest merchants have), and then it doesn't even let you store your excess loot in your base without building a giant stack of expensive industrial-scale storage containers first. There are a handful of infinite-capacity containers available in the Lodge, but they cannot be moved, labeled, or rearranged. Further and most cripplingly, Lodge containers are not linked to the crafting system, meaning any resources in them cannot be drawn from by crafting workbenches without you walking to them and manually withdrawing the needed resources.
Ships, Space Travel, and Space Battles
- The mechanics of space travel in game is probably one of the most contentious design decisions in the game. Taking off, landing, traveling between systems and between planets inside a system, are all done through loading screens. Depending on where you're going, where you're coming from, and how you interact with the UI, you may be looking at one to five separate loading screens per trip. This design has been called dated, immersion-breaking, and clunky. It's been compared unfavorably to space sims like Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky, both games almost a decade old at the time of Starfield's release, which each include seamless transitions between areas. Furthering the frustration is that players have found out that Starfield does load the entire star system when you're in a planet's orbitnote , meaning that is is technically possible to fly between planets without loading screens (if one uses console commands to boost the speed of one's ship), which means it was a conscious design decision, not an engine limitation, to not include it.
- Because of the sheer number of loading screens involved on a trip, the player is encouraged to optimize their interaction with the star map UI to fast travel. For example, by selecting to directly land on a planet rather than go in orbit and then trigger a landing, as this reduces the number of loading screens encountered at no real trade-off. Because the game rewards fast travel, it's often pointed that Starfield de-emphasizes exploration, which was one of the game's biggest selling points pre-release. A player isn't encouraged to check out every system and planet on the way to their destination because each trip is at least one loading screen (and more if they choose to land anywhere). Meanwhile, a player in one of Bethesda's other series, like The Elder Scrolls or Fallout, can stop at every point of interest they come across hassle free before choosing whether or not to engage. Essentially, these factors actively encourage a Starfield player to beeline to their destination via fast travel, meaning they'll never encounter some of the side content.
- Ship turrets are very powerful, especially on large and heavy ships that lack the agility for proper Old-School Dogfighting. The problem is that there's absolutely no way to give turrets targeting priorities, as they simply shoot at random targets in range, regardless of whether or not their weapon type is actually effective or if that target is even the biggest threat. One can't even use the VATS-style targeting system to force the turrets to focus fire on a specific enemy ship. The result is wildly spread-out damage output that can't compete with focusing enemies down manually with your Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon array.
- Changing anything on your starship, even if it's just applying a different paint job, resets the entire ship and moves any loose objects inside to its storage. While thoughtful in case of weapons you displayed in an armory that might no longer be part of the ship, this also includes every single decorative junk item like pencils, coffee mugs, potted plants, and such, which are then respawned immediately at their original location if the module that contained them is still present. This mechanic can quickly clog your ship cargo storage with hundreds, if not thousands of near-worthless garbage items that can take several minutes of Button Mashing to get rid off at the nearest vendor. There is at least a small saving grace to this in that selling all of them is an easy way to hit the quotas for your Commerce perk's level up requirements.
- Another with the ship builder — it is impossible to design the interior. Furthermore, something the game does not tell you, the order in which components are added (as well as their manufacturers) affects where doorways and ladders between components are placed. Components doorways have different levels of priorities (which the game won't tell you about) dictating where passages are most likely to be, and the first two habs connected vertically will spawn a ladder even if a two story component with built-in stairs is added to connect the two after the fact. The ship builder loves to create dead ends, even if you lay out components in such a way that they should be able to form a continuous loop between them. You can easily have two habs be side by side yet have no connections between them as the game decides the only way to go from one to the other might involve crossing the entire width of the ship. There is no means to preview the ship interior before saving (which means if you don't like it you need to go back and edit your ship, running into the issue again). The lack of interior preview also means that it's impossible to know which habs contain what crafting station or facilities without looking it up online. (For example, not all armories come with mannequins). Players have taken to building and sharing online spreadsheets compiling what hab contains which objects. Making this even more difficult, doors can replace certain facilities in a hab depending where that door is as generating a door makes the game remove the wall that door is on and anything attached to it or in front of it.
- While in the ship builder, there is no way to save your progress. You can't exit if your ship has any "errors", so, for example, you don't have the option to partially build a ship on one planet and then go to another with different parts to finish it. While it would make sense if this applied to your "home" ship (guaranteeing that you'll have at least one functional ship), you can't "partially" build any ship you have in this fashion. Further, given the sheer amount of time you can spend building your ship in a single go, especially if doing a drastic rebuild, you risk losing all of that time should you run into a crash or bug as you can't save in the ship builder screen.
- There's no way to take components from one ship and add them to another ship you already own. You can strip a ship down and reuse the stripped components as you rebuild it from scratch, but if you want to put ship A's guns on ship B, you need to find a technician who sells those guns (and buy them again, at full price).
- No matter how much you upgrade your scanning abilities, you can't fully survey lifeless planets you can land on from orbit. You have to make planetfall to manually scan every inorganic element at least once, even though you already know which elements are present and where they can be found.
- Being able to board and capture ships by disabling their engines is great and all, but many of the ones you're likely to seize are going to be marked as Unregistered... which requires you fork over a fee of around a whopping 90% of the ship's total value before you can do anything with them. This means you can't really make any reasonable kind of money by "flipping" stolen ships, which is doubly frustrating as ship service technicians have some of the largest cash pools out of all merchants and thus are in the best position to actually afford to pay you what those ships are worth. The registration fee means that the profit of selling a ship is almost always less than you get from selling the guns you took from the dead crew. Throw in the hassle of all your stuff shuffling back and forth and having to swap ships all the time, and it's rarely worth the hassle.
Outposts
- Transferring cargo between outposts requires the construction of cargo links, either normal ones for interplanetary transport or interstellar ones for moving stuff between star systems. While the intention seems to be that you build a bunch of mining outpost within a single star system, ferry everything to a hub base with an interstellar link, and then move it to your main base from there for further processing, it doesn't work this way. Cargo links can only link to one other cargo link, meaning that a hub base requires the construction of one cargo link per satellite base. Given the size of cargo links, you may well end up being unable to cram all the required buildings into your hub base's limited build area, not to mention it pretty much prevents you from using the hub base for anything but cargo transfer. The menus to set up transfer routes between cargo links aren't exactly intuitive either, plus the whole system is buggy as hell, with cargo randomly being lost in transit, being moved in the wrong direction, or just not being moved at all for no apparent reason.
- You're arbitrarily prevented from establishing outposts within about 200m of most planetary "points of interest". Beyond the fact that some of these POIs would make for an interesting settlement backdrop, resource veins still form close to them. It's frustrating to find a spot where you could mine multiple resources at once... only to be prevented from establishing an outpost there because it's too close to a POI.
- Outposts are, by and large, useless. The only thing they provide are crafting materials, which you can just buy for cheap from various material merchants, located in every major city. Sure you can sell your bulk produced materials for money, but you'll run into the aforementioned merchant cash limit problem - selling your regular loot is already a pain, all the materials will just make issues finding merchants with enough cash worse. Second, unlocking all the perks relating to building, decorating and managing your outposts eats a ton of perk points you could be spending on things that actually help you in combat. Thirdly, building a base requires crafting materials anyway, the more complex and numerous your bases, the more materials go into it. Lastly, because New Game Plus wipes the slate clean each time, the huge time you spend carefully crafted an idyllic picturesque base with the optimal outputs to meet your needs is wasted the moment you hit New Game Plus. On top of that, Adhesive, one of the most used component and therefore something you'd probably want to have an outpost produce, basically only has two planets upon which it can be found and therefore harvested. Merchants do sell it however, again encouraging the player to just not bother with outposts.
Traits, Skills, Powers, etc.
- The inclusion of and process of leveling Starborn powers. The powers don't appear in marketing, wouldn't be missed from the general design of the game world, are only available if you progress deep into the main quest, are tedious by design to level with little indication you even can do that, and several completely change how you can play the game. Personal Atmosphere negates being overencumbered while Phase Time lets you play like its Dishonored. Further, Phase Time in particular is never emphasized and players doing NG+ without reading guides probably realize they have it by accident.
- Several skills provide abilities that many players agree should have been available without investing in a skill. The biggest offender is the Boost Pack skill, as you are unable to boost jump at all without it despite boost packs being required to survive in space. Other annoying skills provide features that were given to the player from the start in previous Bethesda games, such as requiring an investment in Sneak for the player to be able to tell if they are even hidden. It forces the player to invest points in skills early on just to have quality-of-life features, even if they didn't plan to invest in future ranks of that skill.
- The Ship Command skill. It is easy to build a ship with up to 10 max crew, but despite that you are limited to only three crew on your ship until you rank up Ship Command, which is a master-level Social skill and thus requires at least 12 levels invested in the Social tree before it can even begin to rank up. And even at Rank 4, the skill still limits you to less than the highest possible max crew you can achieve on a ship. Including Sarah Morgan in the crew does give 1 additional Ship Command slot, but even with that you still fall short of the max 10 crew.
- Persuasion is a useful skill, but is poorly explained. Levelling up your Persuasion skill or using items increases your percentage chance of persuading someone, but the game does not tell you what your base chance is, or how the difficulty of an option affects the chance of passing it (apart from the obvious but vague green-yellow-orange-red scale with red being the hardest). Rolling against a hidden percentage also means that you can't be certain of passing a check, even at maximum level. In summary, if you see a Persuasion check coming, Save Scum it. Further, Diplomacy, Manipulation, and Intimidation also affect the persuasion skill, sometimes adding new options, which often are guaranteed successes. This isn't explained by the description of any of the skills.
- Modding most equipment requires spending a point in the associated skill (Weapon Modding, Equipment Modding, etc.), which unlocks the ability to spend resources to research the most basic mods of a type, which unlocks the ability to commit further resources to do the actual mod. Mods for basic things like switching a weapon between semi and fully automatic or increasing the environmental resistance of your pack can take twenty or more separate steps/unlocks to reach. One can't help but feel like the game shows you all kinds of neat things you can do, only to fight you every step of the way when you try.
- Melee weapons are also entirely unmodifiable, so if you were hoping to do a melee focused build and get into some fun adventures there a la Space Skyrim you're plain outta luck, because you're entirely reliant on the few melee-oriented perks for advances in effectiveness and will fall behind the ranged weapon scaling. Especially galling to players coming in from Fallout 4 or 76, where, at the very least, you could do things like add a serrated edge to your combat knife or spikes to your brass knuckles.
Other Mechanics
- Environmental Hazards and protection when exploring planets is poorly explained and rife with bugs that make figuring out how it works even harder. The game never quite explains how the numerical protection values correlate to a given hazard type beyond "bigger number is better" or just how protection depletion works. For example, you can explore a planet that's -150 degrees for hours without issue, yet contract Frostbite within five minutes on a world that's -10 degrees.
- Despite the game advertisement and the perks saying players could specialize in laser weapons and that laser weapons are "common across the settled systems", there's only five energy weapon types in the entire game - the Solstice pistols, the Equinox rifles, the Orion rifles, The Arc Welder, and the mining Cutter (each has unique variants of these base weapons). They use the same two ammo types (save for the Cutter which does not use ammo but recharges instead), and behave very similarly (the Orion being basically a strict upgrade to the Equinox). If you count EM weaponsnote this adds a sixth weapon set to the list. This means that a player specializing in laser weapons is not only severely limiting their play options, but also runs the risk of severe ammo starvation as all their weapons will draw from the same ammo pool. Meanwhile there are over a dozen ballistic weapons with almost as many ammo types fostering incredible diversity in playstyle if a player decides to go for ballistic weapons. Despite being set further in the future, there are fewer energy weapon types than in a Fallout game and specializing in energy weapon is almost a trap. The only "real" benefit to using laser weapons is the very-situational ability to shoot people through windows with them (laser beams are just light and windows don't stop light passing through them).
- The power temple 'puzzles' involve flying around a small zero g environment hitting lights. That is, if the game decides this particular light is 'real' or you just fly through it. Every time it takes longer than it should, it's not particularly engaging or interesting, and it's exactly the same for every temple you visit — 24 of them per universe, so if you play through all of the New Game Plus content, you will have to do this minigame 240 times.
- While the new lockpicking mini game is generally more engaging than that of Skyrim and Fallout 4, it's not without issues. First of all, lockpicking anything consumes at least one digipick, even on a straight success. So be ready to hoard these things as you will burn through them insanely fast, doubly so if you use the various undo features the game offers to correct mistakes. Second, lockpicking, especially higher end lock, takes a lot more time. Several high-rating locks in a row can become a serious chore. Lastly, there's no correlation between the quality of a lock and the loot you find. A master lock may have 300 credits and a piece of Chunks steak, while a novice lock may have legendary gear and 20 Adhesives. This makes investing further into the lockpicking perk a bit of a dicey proposition as they take longer to pick, may consume several picks, and often offer no reward for doing so. Bethesda recognized the later bit with a patch 6 months after the game's launch removing the undo function consuming a pick.
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