Bethesda announced Starfield five years ago at E3 2018, but Bethesda Game Studios started working on it well before that, trademarking the name “Starfield” all the way back in 2013. Now the space RPG, which represents Bethesda’s first new setting in over 25 years, is finally out for owners of the $100 Premium Edition or the $300 physical Constellation Edition (which includes a fun watch).
The result of all those years of development is Bethesda’s biggest RPG ever, though not everyone thinks it’s Bethesda’s best RPG ever. In his 75% Starfield review, Chris says that Bethesda’s new universe “ultimately falls far short of the greatness” of Fallout 4 and Skyrim—but that he does like it. Other critic reviews include enthusiastic 10-out-of-10s as well as harsher expressions of disappointment. It’s no surprise that this giant game (which also happens to be an Xbox console exclusive due to Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda) is a divisive one.
Although the expected, and often endearing, Bethesda jank persists, Starfield hasn’t been gruesomely buggy for us—it’s a lot of “characters appearing in their underwear when they’re not supposed to” stuff, with just a small side of more serious progress disrupting bugs. It had to have helped that Starfield was significantly delayed. The RPG was originally going to release last year on November 11, exactly 11 years after Skyrim released on November 11, 2011—Bethesda loves it some 11s, for some reason—but got pushed to this year. That decision came from Microsoft, which acquired Bethesda in 2021, just a year before Starfield was originally meant to come out.
“The decision to give the team the time to build the game that they feel they should be building is just the right thing to do,” Xbox head Phil Spencer later said about the delay.
After over nine months of post-delay waiting, anyone who owns the Premium Edition can start playing now (give or take some technical hiccups with the unlocking) on Xbox, Steam , and the Microsoft Store, while Standard Edition owners have to wait another week, until September 6. That’s the official release date, and those taking their first moon steps today are technically playing during the “early access” period—a name that bugs me, because “early access” already means something and it isn’t “one week of advance access for $30 extra.”
This early access period also means that Game Pass subscribers who are promised “day one” access to Microsoft’s games aren’t really getting day one access, because Starfield isn’t available to all Game Pass subscribers until September 6. It is possible to get Starfield early access on Game Pass, but you have to buy the Premium Edition Upgrade for $31.49. As I said the other day, it doesn’t feel like Microsoft is fully committed to Game Pass given that it’s already made up a technicality that lets it drive more one-time purchases for a big game by redefining “day one.”
Whatever route you take, if you plan to play Starfield, you might need to clear some SSD space: the Starfield system requirements ask for 125GB, and the actual size of my install is 116.27GB. With Baldur’s Gate 3 already taking up 136GB on my main games SSD, I’m very nearly overencumbered by RPGs.