Starfield review: Guns and ships galore, but a vacuum of wonder

techcrunch.com:

The long-awaited “Skyrim in space,” Starfield, is out today after many years in development over at Bethesda. It’s ambitious and lavishly produced, but despite its size it lacks the sense of wonder and vastness that its pastoral predecessor epitomized.

(I and my colleague Darrell both played the game and came away with differing impressions — he also played on console while I played on PC.)

Starfield follows the adventures of your character in the 2300s, when hundreds of star systems have been colonized but much of what’s out there is still unknown. You fall in with Constellation, a group of explorers on the trail of a set of mysterious artifacts that hint at a greater presence at work in the galaxy… and your destiny! (Minor early game spoilers ahead.)

Sound familiar? It should, as this is the general shape of half the space-based adventures out there. But where Starfield sets itself apart is in the scale of the game world and the player’s freedom to explore it, boasting an open galaxy of a thousand planets. Admittedly, other games also attempt to set themselves apart this way, but let’s move on.

Like Skyrim, once you get past a few initial missions that introduce the characters and mechanics, you’re more or less free to explore. But here we hit our first, and perhaps most important, issue.

While its august predecessor and other open world games like Tears of the Kingdom, Elden Ring, and Horizon: Forbidden West take place in huge, continuous lands dotted with points of interest, Starfield’s open world is spread over dozens of star systems and individual planets, which leads to a fundamentally less compelling form of exploration.

Dots… dots everywhere!

Instead of walking or riding (or as in countless other space exploration