Starfield: A Thousand Planets and One Loading Screen

Somewhere in the Settled Systems there’s a planet with an outpost you can build, a Vasco-class robot companion you can bring along, and a door back to your ship that takes roughly four seconds to open. Multiply that door by every planet landing, every ship interior, every building entrance, every menu you didn’t ask for, across a hundred-plus hours, and you have the single fact that decided how Starfield would be received on release.

Bethesda Game Studios shipped Starfield on 6 September 2023, directed by Todd Howard, the studio’s first wholly new IP since The Elder Scrolls. The pitch was audacious on paper: roughly a thousand explorable planets across the Settled Systems, a player character recruited into Constellation, humanity’s last organisation of explorers, chasing a set of ancient artefacts that turn out to open onto a New Game Plus structure built directly into the story. It’s a technically extraordinary thing to have built. It’s also a game whose actual texture, moment to moment, is defined by how often it stops you to load something.

Why the loop works when it’s allowed to

Strip away the planetary scale for a moment and the systems underneath are genuinely well made. Ship combat has real weight — power has to be manually routed between weapons, shields and engines mid-fight, and a ship built for cargo capacity handles a firefight differently from one built for speed, which makes ship design a meaningful build choice rather than a stat sheet. Ship building itself, piece by piece in the vendor menus, is one of the best crafting systems Bethesda has shipped, precisely because the pieces are visible and functional rather than abstract materials feeding an invisible formula.

The Constellation storyline, when it’s running at its best, gives the artefact hunt real emotional stakes through companions like Sarah Morgan and Barrett, whose reactions to the player’s growing understanding of the Unity phenomenon carry the writing’s most interesting material. And New Atlantis, the United Colonies’ capital, is a genuinely dense hand-crafted city — verticality, faction politics, a skyline that reads as planned rather than generated. Where Bethesda built things by hand, the game plays like Bethesda.

Why it doesn’t, and the honest reason

The problem is procedural generation covering the other 990-odd planets, and the honest description of what that produces is repetition dressed as scale. Landing on an unexplored world drops you into a procedurally tiled patch of terrain populated by the same handful of building templates, the same creature families reskinned by biome, and points of interest that recur often enough that experienced players learn to recognise the outpost layout on sight within the first ten hours. A thousand planets sounds like an argument for exploration; in practice it’s an argument that most exploration in this genre needs authored content to reward attention, and generating a number that large guarantees the opposite.

The loading screens are the more specific complaint, and they’re specific for a reason: this is not a seamless universe. Landing on a planet from orbit is a load. Leaving a planet is a load. Entering almost any building, including your own ship, is a load. Fast travel between systems is a load stacked on a load. None of that is fatal in isolation — plenty of good RPGs load between areas — but it collides badly with a premise that’s explicitly selling scale and freedom, because every door in this specific game is a reminder that the freedom stops at the frame.

The outpost system suffers a related problem in miniature. Extraction nodes, resource chains and the crafting they feed are genuinely deep — cabling power between an outpost’s habs and extractors is a real logistics puzzle, and linking outposts together into a supply network is one of the more satisfying late-game systems Bethesda has built. But the planets those outposts sit on are the same procedurally tiled terrain as everywhere else, so the loop of “find a resource-rich world, drop an outpost, automate it” never gets to feel like claiming a place the way an equivalent system in a hand-built world would. The economics are real. The geography underneath them is wallpaper.

The ancestor: a floppy disk beat this problem thirty years earlier

The frustrating part of writing about Starfield’s loading screens in 2023 is that the specific problem — moving between orbit, atmosphere and a planet’s surface without a hard cut — was solved on far weaker hardware decades earlier. David Braben’s Frontier: Elite II shipped on the Amiga and PC in 1993 with a genuine Newtonian flight model and continuous transitions between deep space, orbit and planetary landing, all running on a machine with a fraction of a modern console’s memory, a story told properly here. Its predecessor, Elite on the C64, managed a comparably seamless illusion of a living galaxy inside 32 kilobytes, an achievement this site has traced in detail. Neither game had a thousand planets. Both understood that the transition between scales is the part of a space game players actually remember, and both solved it as a first-class design problem rather than an engineering afterthought.

Starfield’s loading screens aren’t a hardware limitation in 2023 the way they arguably were in 1984 or 1993 — they’re the result of Bethesda’s Creation Engine architecture, built for hand-authored cell-based worlds, being asked to do something it wasn’t designed for. That’s a legitimate engineering trade-off, and there’s a real argument that the hand-crafted cities and interiors it buys are worth the doors. But it’s a trade-off, not a scale achievement, and the marketing sold the second thing while shipping the first.

The factions are where the writing actually lives

Set the planetary generation aside and the faction questlines are where Starfield’s writing does its best work, because each one is hand-authored rather than procedural and each commits to a genuinely different tone. The United Colonies’ military storyline plays as bureaucratic institutional drama; the Freestar Collective’s Rangers questline is a western, complete with a bounty-hunter structure and a courtroom-style trial sequence; Ryujin Industries runs a corporate-espionage plot built almost entirely on dialogue checks and persuasion rather than combat; and the Crimson Fleet questline lets the player either join the pirates outright or infiltrate them as an undercover UC agent, with the game tracking that duplicity across every later mission. That range — western, corporate thriller, military procedural, heist — is the strongest evidence that Bethesda’s writers understood exactly what made Fallout and The Elder Scrolls work, and applied it correctly wherever they weren’t fighting the procedural generation for space to do it.

Companions carry the same hand-authored weight. Sarah Morgan, Barrett, Sam Coe and Andreja each have their own affinity system and romance arc gated behind approval of the player’s choices, and Vasco — the ship-based robot companion recruited early via The Old Neighborhood questline — is the rare companion who isn’t angling for a relationship at all, which the writing uses for some of its driest, best jokes. None of this needed a thousand planets to land. It needed rooms, and Bethesda still knows how to build those.

The map-screen problem, twice over

Fast travel compounds the issue rather than solving it. Once a location is discovered, the player can jump directly to it from a system map with no transit at all, which erases the sense of a living solar system in exchange for convenience — the same trade-off examined at length here. Combined with the loading screens on the other end of the same journeys, the result is a game that offers neither the tactile pleasure of travelling somewhere nor the uninterrupted flow of skipping there instantly. It has built a map screen that quietly admits the world underneath it can’t sustain attention on its own terms, then asks the player to load through a door to reach the map screen in the first place.

The reception arc is the honest scoreboard

The critical response tracked the gap between premise and delivery almost in real time. Starfield launched day one on Xbox Game Pass and PC, alongside a traditional retail release, and initial reviews were broadly positive, praising the scope of the systems even where they flagged the loading screens and planetary repetition as the obvious weak point. The player conversation cooled over the following months in a way review-week coverage rarely captures, for a simple reason: the sheer number of hours needed to notice how often the procedural planets repeat their own furniture only becomes obvious well past the point most reviews are filed. That lag between review-copy impressions and long-term player sentiment is itself a data point about the design: a game engineered to impress in the first twenty hours and only reveal its seams in the hundredth is a game that optimised for the wrong twenty hours.

The verdict, and where to play next

Starfield is not a bad game. The ship combat, the outpost and vendor crafting, and the hand-built cities are genuinely strong Bethesda systems, and the New Game Plus structure built around the Unity artefacts gives the RPG loop a philosophical hook most open-world games don’t attempt. What it isn’t is the seamless thousand-world universe the premise promises, and the honest verdict has to sit with the gap between those two things rather than pretend the door count doesn’t matter.

Play it for the ship-building and the Constellation storyline, on PC or Series X, with patience for the loading between planetary content set correctly from the start. Anyone drawn to the promise of a living solar system with continuous travel should go back to Frontier: Elite II first — it did the actual thing thirty years earlier, on a fraction of the silicon, because it treated the transition as the design rather than the tax on it.

Spoilers below

The Unity, reached by collecting the full set of artefacts, sends the player character into an alternate version of the Settled Systems with select progress — skills, some relationships, certain items — carried across, in a structure that functions as the game’s built-in New Game Plus. Constellation’s founder, and the game’s central antagonist faction, the Hunter-aligned and Emissary-aligned player choices around the House Va’ruun religious order, split the endgame’s final act into materially different resolutions depending on which faction the player sided with across the main quest, including whether Va’ruun’s home system is approached as a threat or as the origin point the artefacts were always pointing toward.