Forget charting a thousand alien worlds; I just wanna be a snack pirate.
It’s been clear since the first proper reveal that Starfield was going to be Bethesda’s most ambitious RPG. A thousand worlds, fully customisable space ships, a new level of sandboxy freedom—there’s certainly a lot of potential here, but every time it’s been shown off I’ve been unable to shrug off the feeling that it’s all going to be a wee bit dull. Big, sure, but also dry.
This was really typified in the recent Starfield Direct when we were promised that we could land on a planet, “collect resources, do a mission and maybe even stumble upon something unexpected”. What the video actually showed us, though, was Starfield’s space explorer stumbling across an abandoned mine—the kind of thing you can find in nearly every RPG that’s ever existed. OK, I thought, maybe there will at least be something weird and memorable in this abandoned mine. Nope. Just some space bandits.
I get it: you can’t fill a sandbox like this exclusively with thrilling, bespoke diversions. And if the combat is good enough, there are still opportunities to make a mine-delving adventure a good time. Maybe there’s some killer loot in there to make it all worthwhile. But it definitely doesn’t feel showcase-worthy.
Where things really clicked for me was the sandwich heist.
