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- Angst? What Angst?:
- The game doesn't give a lick about your relationship status with your companions. If you marry one of them and they end up dying during the main questline, you can hook up with another companion before your late spouse has been given a proper sendoff. You can even show up to their memorial service alongside your new flame and nobody will bat an eye. Dialogue choices when talking about your loved one also don't change at all, making it seem like the Player Character forgot they were married the moment their spouse kicked the bucket.
- Similarly, the endgame revolves around going to a new universe, leaving your spouse (and if your spouse was Sam, your step-daughter Cora behind) as you all get sent to different universes. As the game doesn't keep track of what you did in your previous playthrough beyond player stats and powers, your character effectively forgets all about the loved ones they've lost, and never remarks upon them even as you meet their duplicates. Furthermore, if you get married after the point in the main story where you learn that this is the ending, no one mentions how this marriage is kind of clearly doomed.
- Awesome Music: Inon Zur is in full Space Opera mode for this one
, and it's glorious.- "The Sol System", which manages to capture the awe-inspiring beauty of space as you fly through it. It also has a slightly bittersweet tone to it, fitting of it being named after humanity's home star system in which the home planet of humankind, Earth, has been reduced to a dusty wasteland.
- "The Sol System
- Best Level Ever: Bethesda games are infamous for their rather lackluster main storylines, and Starfield is no exception, but one quest that does stand out is "Entangled". It's a grueling Marathon Level with Dual-World Gameplay between two alternate versions of a science lab where some Artifact research project went horribly off the rails. The well-written story, seamless switching between realities, clever use of level geometry on both sides, incredibly tense atmosphere, and the presence of a secret Golden Ending that requires players to think outside the box and pay attention to the dialogue and set dressing make Entangled by far one of the best quests in any Bethesda game ever, especially while being part of the main story.
- Captain Obvious Reveal: Andreja is very cagey about her background, but if you've had any contact with Va'ruun zealots at all, you'll recognize she's part of this faction just from looking at the design of her outfit, especially coupled with the fact that she's introduced as being hunted by their more zealous members, doesn't want to talk about it, and makes repeated references to her "family" who raised her to hate and distrust outsiders. Her revelation that she's with the Va'ruun is nonetheless treated like a shocking reveal (and none of the dialog options offered to the player in response allow them to express anything but shock.) There is an element of downplaying in that part of the reveal is that she isn't a Va'ruun Zealot, but from House Va'ruun proper, something that's less obvious before that point.
- Crosses the Line Twice: The scene in the 2023 Deep Dive that revealed the Adoring Fan. Lusting over the Player Character to the point of wanting to breathe the same air just like a Yandere would? Quite creepy with a hint of Squick. The fact that it's the Adoring Fan of all people, and you get to bring them along before potentially ending their life where no one would ever find them? Hilarious.
- Demonic Spiders: Red Mile Maulers, hyper-aggressive damage sponge armored quadrapedal lizard beasts that swarm you and have a quake attack that can stun you from afar before they get to melee range. It doesn't help that Porrima III, the planet they're on, has twice Earth-standard gravity, so running from them will tire you out quickly. They're Super-Persistent Predators, so you can't get far enough away from them to lose interest so you can fast travel to escape as well. To add insult to injury, killing one yields a paltry 6 XP.
- Difficulty Spike: The Ryujin questline has a massive one in its latter third. The first half-dozen quests are trivial, but what follows next can turn into a very frustrating experience if your character isn't highly proficient in sneaking, lockpicking, pickpocketing and persuasion. Most quests past this point require you to stealth past large numbers of guards, and although you can fight your way through, your employer makes it abundantly clear that this is not how you're supposed to approach these missions.
- Fan Nickname: Unlike previous Bethesda titles like Fallout 3 (Lone Wanderer), New Vegas (The Courier), Skyrim (Dovahkiin, Dragonborn), and Fallout 4 (Sole Survivor), Starfield's main character does not have a designated title. In lieu of this, fans have taken to referring to the main character as "The Spacefarer". Eventually, you gained magical powers as a result of collecting the artifacts, and taken to be called "Starborn". However you're not the only one Starborn.
- Game-Breaker:
- Enemy ships' weapon systems aim for the exact geometric center of your ship (as determined by its total height, length, and width). This means that if you build your ship in an unconventional shape that leaves open space at this midpoint, enemy ships will miss nearly all of their shots on you, only capable of hitting you from angles where a piece of your ship blocks line-of-sight to the point they're targeting.
- As ship weapons go, high-quality particle beam cannons make every other gun type obsolete. They deal more damage to both shields and health, can shoot two to three times as far, and consume the same amount of power (and sometimes even less). Once you've unlocked them there's really no gameplay reason to use anything else, except for maybe a missile launcher or two for their tracking capabilities, and perhaps electromagnetic weapons for their disabling capabilities.
- Leaving the pilot's seat on your ship causes enemy ships to pause their attacks on you. Allowing your ship to begin regenerating shielding. You can trivialize many encounters this way by getting up, waiting a bit for your shields to return, then sitting back down to resume the battle.
- The Phase Time power can completely trivialize most encounters and bosses. It works like the Slow Time shout in Skyrim, where the player slows down slightly but everything else slows down far more. Enemies will move so slowly they might as well be standing still. One can unload an entire clip into a boss without fear of retaliation or evasion for the duration of the power. This is especially effective with builds that focus on headshots as the slowed enemies are sitting ducks for headshot aiming. This gets exacerbated via New Game Plus runs, as finding a power enhances it in some way, and in Phase Time's case, it reduces its cost. With enough levels, it is possible to give the power 100% uptime at your command.
- Coachman shotguns can be upgraded to use Hornet Nest Rounds, which fly forward a moderate distance before exploding into a rain of explosive projectiles. If it makes direct contact with an enemy, they take the full force of all of the explosive clusters, which allows the gun to function as both an extremely strong slug shotgun and an effective area-clearer. The raw damage it puts out significantly outperforms most other weapons, apart from grenade launchers that also have the Hornet Nest round. However, the Coachman uses Caseless Shotgun Shells which is a very plentiful type of ammunition, especially when compared to the scarce 40mm XPL that grenade launchers use. To top all of this, it only requires the Weapon Modification 3 skill, which can be obtained as early as level 5 with the appropriate starting skills, turning the weapon into an extremely viable Disc-One Nuke that matures into an all-around Game Breaker as the player obtains stronger variants of the Coachman.
- Good Bad Bugs:
- Sometimes NPCS will walk around without spacesuits, even on planets with no atmosphere.
- In the lodge of Constellation, there's a display case locked with a Master lock and a mannequin behind it wearing the Mark 1 spacesuit, with helmet and jump pack. Normally one would need Master-level lockpicking to attempt to get it open, but there's a tiny sliver of room between the door and a pane of glass for a player to angle their cursor and just take the suit directly from the mannequin directly with no lockpicking required.
- A returning bug from older Bethesda games. Some merchant store chest remain possible to interact with through the floor.
- Travel to further-flung system is normally limited by your grav drive. However, once you visit a planet, you can always return to it via fast travel. If you don't have the cash for a proper upgrade, it's possible to reach a planet in a ship with a powerful drive but limited cargo space, then go back to it in another with a smaller drive but more cargo in order to retrieve resources.
- Have a ship design in mind but can't get the pieces to connect because of lack of clearance? You can actually make some pieces clip into each other on purpose by switching between a smaller variant and then back to a larger variant while positioning them.
- He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: Youtuber Heel vs Babyface went viral in a rant against the game for having the option to select pronouns, claiming that such a thing injects politics in the game and destroys immersion into the game world. Some Starfield fans were not particularly happy with the accusation and threw it back at him pointing out that the option is really just an option and that it defaults to the most common pronouns to the body type selected, meaning you don't even have to select anything and accuse him of being outraged for the sake of clicks.
- It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A complaint is that the game shows little improvement or advancement over Bethesda's previous titles. The core gameplay is typical of Bethesda's Fallout or Elder Scrolls game, down to featuring some bugs first seen in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (such as characters falling through the floor, clipping through doors, clustering around doorways blocking passage, corpses spazzing out when they clip the surrounding geometry, etc...). Strip away the space sim elements (who are often perceived as lackluster and the game's weaker aspects to begin with), and you have a game that in terms of gameplay is almost identical to Fallout 4 but in space.
- Memetic Mutation:
- "Starfield on Playstation is still possible!"Explanation
- The explicit comparison by Todd Howard, to Skyrim, has invited memes built on the idea such as "you spend 8 hours exploring a planet and fighting off bad guys, but the only loot you get is two microscopes, 34 credits, a health kit, and a can of green spaceship paint"note .
- No Man's Skyrim. Explanation
- "I can't believe I get to stand near you breathing the same air. I've got to have every molecule." Explanation
- "FUCKIN' PRONOUNS! FUCKIN' GENDER AMBIGUITY! FUCKIN' CURRENT DAY CALIFORNIAN SHIT!" Explanation
- Narm:
- When you romance a character and have them as your companion, resting in any bed will result with them making comments implying how the player and them had raunchy sex. That in itself can be a little awkward, but what puts it into full narm territory is the fact that they always make a comment after you sleep in a bed, even when you sleep in a bed among a pile of bodies or even right in front of someone.
- Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: It wouldn't be a BGS title if it didn't have some semblance of this.
- Regardless of how you might feel about the Ship Builder as mentioned above in Scrappy Mechanic, you're probably gonna be spending a copious amount of time either trying to build the perfect ship or even recreating sci-fi icons like the Millennium Falcon, Milano, or the Razor Crest, among others.
- Relating to the above, if you can't quite afford a new ship, there's always the option of stealing them from any Spacers or Crimson Fleet you come across. Just remember to either jettison any contraband your new ship might have (which will be a common occurrence) or offload it at The Den in the Wolf system, as you probably won't have access to Shielded Cargo until you've got enough Credits (and/or enough investment in Spaceship Design) to spare.
- If you enjoyed the Settlement Building system back in Fallout 4, you'll be right at home with the Outpost system here. Now with the added bonus of being able to make Outposts almost anywhere you want á la Fallout 76.
- Slow-Paced Beginning: A criticism of the game is that it takes several hours to open up, compared to most other Bethesda Games which are relatively quick at getting the player into the meat of the game.
- Spiritual Successor: People have compared this game to Traveller, which is further emphasized by Todd Howard stated its an influence on the game's development.
- Tainted by the Preview:
- After the disastrous launch of Fallout 76, which the shortfalls of the Creation Engine played a large part in, the internet was not happy to learn that Todd Howard stated in an interview that Starfield would be using a modified version of the Creation Engine which many feel was outdated by and should’ve been retired after Skyrim.
- After the gameplay demo in the Summer of 2022, some players were put off by the game, feeling as though their worries about the Creation Engine were justified. Not only were there the classic "dead-eyed Bethesda NPCs" but the game was running at a noticeably choppy framerate, and the gunplay did not look like it had improved much, if at all, from previous Bethesda games. Considering Bethesda's track record, they weren't hopeful that these issues would be solved at launch, or that Bethesda wouldn't once again be releasing a technically unpolished game and are hoping that the modding community will bail them out.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- Although Starfield's Lockpicking Minigame is a fun idea and a welcome change of pace, the fact that you can't open a lock without consuming at least one digipick hasn't gone over well with some players, as it makes your personal skill at playing the minigame completely irrelevant. Also at higher lock difficulty the minigame can become much more time consuming, which can lead to having to do several expert or master lock in a row to become a tad tedious as each puzzle eats a few minutes of time.
- The equipment upgrade system is largely similar to that in Fallout 4, yet feels like a significant downgrade at the same time. For one, gear can no longer be disassembled for crafting components. Weapon and armor mods are also no longer independent entities that can be switched between items of the same type - if you craft a new barrel mod, the old one is just gone. This in turn means that every time you find an improved version of your favorite gun, you need to craft all upgrades from scratch, and some of them are quite expensive. And that's assuming you're even skilled enough to craft what you want in the first place, because removing preexisting mods from looted gear and attaching them to where you want to have them is no longer possible. In a separate downgrade, melee weapons can't be upgraded at all.
- Unexpected Character: It's safe to say no one was expecting the Adoring Fan to show up in the Starfield Direct.
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