Starfield's biggest issues can't be solved with patches, mods, or expansions

This week Bethesda teased upcoming patches for Starfield that will add everything from "city maps, to mod support, to all new ways of travelling." That's great news, especially since a lot of the features they're planning to add come straight from community requests.

But even when these patches arrive next year, is that really going to make me want to play more Starfield? If the new travel options are ground vehicles or alien mounts or speeder bikes, great—exploring planets slowly on foot is definitely a low point in Starfield, and I got pretty tired of trying to find my way through cities with no maps. But those are just a couple of pain points, not the biggest issues with Starfield by far.

To be clear: Starfield is a good game. But like I said in my Starfield review, I didn't want to like Starfield, I wanted to love it. Like Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 3 and 4, I was hoping to be pulled into Starfield's orbit for years rather than just a few weeks. 

That didn't happen, and I think a lot of Starfield players feel the same way about this: we're not mad, we're just disappointed. We were expecting greatness, and we got just fine. Some new features added by patches might eliminate some of the frustrations and improve its systems, but there are deeper and more fundamental problems than a few patches or even a big expansion can fix.

The biggest issues to my mind are:

• Starfield's cities aren't places I want to spend time
• Randomly placed points of interest on huge, procedurally generated planets just can't compare to (mostly) hand-crafted maps with hand-placed points of interest
• Romance options are limited to 'good' characters
• Base building is a big step back from Fallout 4's settlements
• Space travel doesn't feel like travel

The first one is kind of the biggest issue for me. I just don't think Starfield's cities are interesting places to be in. When I think of cities from Skyrim like Whiterun and Riften and Solitude, I feel a strong and warm connection to them, and a big part of that is walking into town and immediately recognizing about 90% of the characters I see. Returning to Dawnstar or Windhelm always feels like coming home, even if I don't live there.

I'm not saying you get to know every Skyrim character—most of their personalities are skin deep, and they do and say very little—but they had enough going on to become familiar and develop an association between them and the intimate spaces they inhabit. By making the cities in Starfield so big and then overstuffing them with hundreds of nameless NPCs, sure, there's a 'wow' moment on your first few visits, but bloat erodes all of the personality. How can a patch, even a big patch, fix a disconnect like that?

Then there's the problem of all those dang planets. A lot has been said about Starfield's "empty" planets, with some fans saying they're boring and Bethesda countering with, essentially, they're meant to be boring. But it's not the emptiness of the planets that's the problem, it's the non-empty ones.

I don't mind running around to find stuff (even if we don't get speeder bikes). After all, I spend lots of time running around in Skyrim and Fallout, too. But in those games you're all but guaranteed to have some sort of interesting encounter along the way. It may be simple combat, but it could be meeting an NPC, finding an inhabited cave, stumbling on a weird shack, or blundering into a new quest. The starting and ending places of a jaunt across Skyrim or Fallout 4 almost always result in some wonderful, convoluted distraction.

In Starfield, running around on a planet never really feels like you're on an adventure in a real place, it feels like what it is: running from one randomly placed box to another. It's not miserable. But it's never memorable.

Cities and planets aside, Bethesda made some weird choices with Starfield—a galaxy with no alien races from the developer that brought you Khajiits and Argonians is still a head-scratcher—but nothing feels weirder than the fact that the only followers you can romance all belong to the Constellation guild. The nice guild.

What was the reasoning there, exactly? There's a space pirate guild, and you're telling me I can't romance a cutthroat marauder? There's a megacorporation full of ambitious agents and high-powered suits, but Bethesda thought I wouldn't want to mix business with pleasure? I just don't get why there's nobody bad to date. Every romantic partner in the game recoils in horror if you dabble even a tiny bit in murder, which feels bizarre for an RPG. 

You know what my wife Mjoll The Lioness did when I went on a brutal rampage in Skyim while trying to build a house? She helped me, and she never once suggested I wasn't right to kill all those innocent people. Romance options should never be limited to only the lawful good. Give us some chaotic evil partners to date.

I was really hoping after Fallout 4's settlement system that Bethesda was building (ha ha!) up to something big. I figured Starfield would expand on that system, letting us found massive human colonies on remote planets, and then, in The Elder Scrolls 6, they'd let us build and manage an actual, honest-to-goodness town of our own. Just imagine founding, building, and ruling a real working city in Tamriel. That'd be amazing.

Now I'm doubtful that will happen. Base-building in Starfield is OK, but it feels like a heavily scaled back version of the system from Fallout 4. You can hire people to work at your base, but once you do there's nothing else to manage for them. Like the modder who created Sim Settlements 2 for Fallout 4 told me, Starfield's outpost system "basically makes the people meaningless." That's the utter opposite of what I was hoping for. This is the one issue I could see being fixed in DLC somewhere down the line, but it's not just about adding more parts and pieces, it's about giving settlements a real feeling of purpose and community.

I know there must be limitations of Starfield's engine, and as Starfield's design director said this week, I'm probably just as disconnected "from the realities of game development" as a lot of players, and I probably don't understand the nuts and bolts of why Starfield "is the way it is."

Even still… there's just too many damn loading screens and cinematic sequences while traveling. There's so many that it never really feels like traveling. I'm sorry to say it! I'm sure those loading screens wouldn't be there if it wasn't absolutely necessary, but that doesn't really comfort me as I'm looking at the 50th damn loading screen in the last 20 minutes of playing. At no point in Starfield do I feel like I'm traveling through space. I'm just waiting for the next bit of space to load.

I'm still looking forward to seeing what Bethesda does with Starfield. Patches will help. Answering community requests is fantastic. Mod support will be wonderful. And I'm sure I'll be back to play whatever DLC arrives for it. But even if smaller problems are fixed, new features are added, and more stories are written in future expansions, I just can't see Bethesda ever fixing Starfield's biggest issues. I might like it more someday, but it's hard to imagine loving it.