This game lets me walk around looking out the windows of and meticulously hand-placing ornaments throughout a homemade, supersized approximation of an interceptor from Homeworld that I built for myself and my posh, English, spatially challenged Judge Anderson cosplayer wife to go dungeon diving in, and you’re telling me there are people who don’t enjoy it?

What’s as striking as this realisation is how much better Starfield feels to fundamentally move around in than Bethesda’s prior titles, especially in third person. Your character shifts their weight and takes a balancing step when moving from one direction to the opposite, the addition of mantling up ledges means where you can or can’t go’s significantly less ambiguous and a hefty degree of animation blending makes their transitioning between states more natural-looking. Beyond making it so that your character now actually feels like part of the world they’re in instead of indifferently gliding over it as in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, this has some positive knock-on effects in terms of environmental design.

Oblivion had its acrobatics and Fallout 4 its jetpack, but these largely weren’t able to factor into how you traversed dungeons since there had to be concessions for the inevitability that not every player would have them. In contrast, Starfield’s boost packs being practically universal alongside planetary modifiers means it can afford to get more creative in this respect. This was apparent even early on when I dropped into a cave on a low-gravity planet and had to get through it by jumping between a series of distant platforms, varying my boost timing to reach some of the taller ones like I was playing Jak & Daxter or something. Another particularly cool one let me float out of the roof of an initially closed hangar after a pirate ship arrived to give its inhabitants some backup, which I could later land my own ship inside after befriending those same pirates. Others still let me circumvent enemy encounters by way of boosting up to an overhead vent, something I might’ve missed if I were playing Starfield like one of Bethesda’s less vertical titles and never looked above me, or more colourfully via shifting between dimensions akin to that one level from Titanfall 2. The setting’s also a great help in terms of making shortcuts through these areas less conspicuous – emergency vents you have to break the seals of or imposing, computerised gates are a more natural fit for this kind of thing than what felt like every other ancient Nordic tomb having a not-so-secret collapsible door.

The semi-procedurally generated nature of Starfield’s planets means there’s always a risk of some of these places losing their lustre through repetition, but are two factors mitigating this. One, there are also no instances of Daggerfall’s ambitious but malevolently complicated RNG hellscapes and two, planets’ environmental conditions go at least some way towards keeping things varied; you’re probably not going to approach a multistorey Ecliptic tower on a nigh-zero G planet the same way you will on one where your feet barely leave the ground, for example. I’m inclined to chalk this up as a net positive partially for that reason and also because it creates a sense of not knowing how you’ll deal with what’s on the horizon even if you can eventually predict it, which is notably beneficial whenever everything’s reshuffled in a new game plus that’s conceptually reminiscent of and similarly sick as Dragon’s Dogma’s. Especially impressive was the fact that, as far as I can recall, I didn’t encounter the same alien wildlife on any two planets except when there was an in-universe explanation for it.

Some may find it dry that Starfield relegates aliens to fauna, but I find it refreshing if anything. A utilitarian focus purely on humanity, our place in the universe and what we ought to do with all that spess out there seem strangely underexplored ideas for how many sci-fi games there are, especially considering how naturally these lend themselves to RPGs specifically. Antagonists bicker over egoism versus altruism, quests commonly pose questions about how far venturing into the unknown is too far, balances of power can be tipped in situations as petty as a dispute between two local shop owners or as grand as instigating conflicts between galaxy-spanning factions, there’s always some trepidation in not knowing whether another spaceship is about to shake you down or treat you to a folk song, etc. Within the limitations of a game, it does quite a sound job of encapsulating what an eclectic bunch we are without being needlessly pessimistic about it.

As the above suggests, I don’t think Starfield’s writing particularly needs defending, in part because it’d do everyone some credit to recognise that writing in RPGs isn’t constrained to just dialogue boxes or cutscenes reflecting the outcomes of your pre-programmed “choices.” Coming across scenes like this tucked away in the collapsed shaft of an abandoned NASA facility, or spacer bases having credstiks strewn about where office appliances ought to be, gets the gears turning in my head as much as or more than any flowery bouts of exposition. In Todd Howard’s interview with Lex Fridman, he mentioned that Bethesda’s got a team specifically for arranging miscellaneous objects throughout their worlds in a way that makes them feel lived-in; although big-brained, standards-having gamers like you and me might scoff in disbelief when we trek outside our bubble and remember that Fallout 3’s not only generally very well liked but also won awards for its storytelling, it becomes easier to wrap your head around when you realise they’ve always been and continue to be ace at this.

An understated but crucial strength of all of these games which accentuates that’s also been expanded upon: Starfield lets you rotate and throw such objects with varying force in addition to being able to pick up and carry them as before. It’s got practical applications (e.g. chucking then shooting hazardous canisters), but to me its real importance is building upon an avenue of the kind of roleplaying that’s essentially unique to this developer, as well as a reason why I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be comparing it to, beyond the vaguest possible descriptors, when I read that it’s allegedly “dated.” Flipping a bucket and sticking it over Vasco’s head, orienting an object into a shopkeeper’s line of sight to prevent them from witnessing theft or otherwise messing about with physics are the kinds of things that I myself might actually do for kicks if I were really in my character’s shoes – I’m not actually a bug-themed, tanto-wielding sentai hero with a suspiciously large and well-organised stockpile of stolen food in his ship’s storage room, but the agency this one mechanic affords goes such a long way toward breaking down the barrier between character and player regardless that you could’ve fooled me.

Player agency falters a bit in other aspects like the abundance of essential NPCs, but this and occasionally finicky menus notwithstanding, I’m unsure which metrics I’m supposed to be gauging to determine that Starfield isn’t probably the best iteration of this formula in more ways than not. There’s not much to disparage here that couldn’t also be said of all its siblings ⁿᵒ ⁿᵉʷ ᵛᵉᵍᵃˢ ⁱˢ ʳᵉᵃˡˡʸ ⁿᵒᵗ ᵗʰᵃᵗ ᵈⁱᶠᶠᵉʳᵉⁿᵗ, except they weren’t counterweighted by the benefits of combat I don’t actively want to avoid whenever possible, the novelty of being able to divert power to different systems in a spaceship or a main quest climax which made me genuinely think about what I’d do in that scenario among other things. Catch me revving up the engines of the Hiigaran Beryl for another several dozen hours hereafter.