Impressions: Starfield’s sheer scale is already giving me vertigo

Enlarge / We are all but specks amid Starfield's vast cosmos.

There's a quote from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. “Space is big,” he writes. “You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.”

Starfield may as well put this quote on the cover page of its design document. The deafening prerelease hype for the game emphasizes its inclusion of “over 1,000 planets,” across hundreds of realistically rendered star systems throughout the galaxy. That promotion has also focused on just how much stuff there is to do across those myriad planets; Bethesda Head of Publishing Pete Hines said in a recent interview with IGN that he’s spent 150–160 hours in the game and “hasn’t even come close” to seeing everything.

After a few dozen hours with a prerelease version of Starfield, I’m comfortable saying that Hines isn’t being hyperbolic. One look at the game’s intricate star map and the myriad star systems you can reach with a series of warp-speed jumps is enough to give you vertigo.

If you can focus on Starfield’s “core story” questline, which focuses on a collection of mysterious, vision-granting Artifacts strewn across the galaxy, you may well be able to reach the “ending” of the game in a reasonable amount of time. If you’re anything like me, though, you’ll find yourself quickly sidetracked by a cornucopia of optional missions that start to grow almost fractally, with each new quest flowing into offers of multiple further quests along the way.