I know it’s not indie, but it’s all I’ve played for days, so I might as well write about it, yeah? Let me just note up front that I will reference the standard retail price as normal at the bottom, but this game is included at no additional cost with Xbox Game Pass subscriptions.

For anyone not interested, here’s a fairly quick rundown of this game: It shares a lot of mechanics and similarities with No Man’s Sky. It also has a lot of similarities to Fallout 3 and other recent games in the series, as well as Elder Scrolls titles Skyrim and Oblivion. Those are all pretty good games and combining them means that Starfield tends to be pretty good as well. It’s not perfect, but it would be extremely difficult for me to honestly say that it’s not good.

Character creation is pretty standard for a Bethesda game, including things like your basic appearance and initial perks and enhancements based on your “backstory.” From there, you head into the introduction and get the story started.

Starfield gets off to a bit of a slow start with a bit of a confusing introduction. You’re a miner working at a jobsite, you touch some sort of artifact, and something happens where you have some sort of hallucination or vision or something and then some stuff happens. There’s another guy this happened to before, so he gives you his ship, his robot sidekick, and links you up with some of his fellow explorer folks who are studying some other artifacts so they can figure out what they are, where they’re from, and what they do (like the Backstreet Boys, am I right?)

At the time of this writing, I have played Starfield for just under 30 hours. In that time, I have done SO MUCH but also SO LITTLE. I have no idea of the story beyond what I just mentioned, but there is such a huge variety of side quests and exploration missions that it almost feels like it doesn’t matter.

To elaborate a little more on the story… I can’t, and there are a couple of reasons for that. First, the story starts off pretty generically and uninspired. Second, I’ve been doing such a huge number of activities and side quests that I don’t think I’ve completed more than maybe two story missions. There is just so much to do, and the majority of it is pretty interesting.

“Impressive” is one of the only ways I can find to describe the world (universe?) of Starfield. Some of the flora and fauna of the planets can be a little bland, but the environments are incredibly detailed and the visuals are fantastic, especially for a world with so much happening. It’s so often that we see small details lowered in an effort to enhance the bigger picture, and that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

Obviously I don’t want to give anything away (not that I’ve seen much so far) but there are some set pieces that really impressed me, and came just at the right time to kinda refresh the experience when things started to drag ever so slightly.

Like any other game, Starfield may not quite land for everyone, but at least for me, it’s been a pretty impressive journey, and I’m excited to see what else I’ll see as I continue playing. For sake of clarity, I’ll also mention that I’ve been playing in 4K on Xbox Series X primarily, but the Game Pass Ultimate version is able to sync your progress to a PC, so I’ve spent around 30% of my playtime there. My Xbox is more convenient for me to play, so it’s gotten the bulk of my playtime, though the only real difference is that the visuals and performance are a little more impressive on the PC, which isn’t a surprise (oh, and mods, but I haven’t gone down that path yet).

What IS a surprise is how well and how seamlessly the sync process works between the two. When you start a new session, the game checks for any differences in progress via the cloud and after a brief sync process you’re right where you left off. Obviously, this process is only truly seamless with a network connection enabled, so it may not work quite as well on a laptop or other portable device if Wi-Fi is scarce.

Anyway if you’ve made it this far through my rambling, you probably feel like this guy: