By Professor Bill Broun

I definitely don’t have enough free time in my life to explore 1,000 planets, and if I did, I’d probably never get my backyard lawn mowed again. But I did take a few hours last week to check out one of the most important new video games drops of the decade.

Bethesda’s epic new Starfield role-playing game offers players a dazzlingly immersive experience that, at moments, feels as if it really does hold endless galaxies of interesting space to explore. It’s a fun game, overall, but also one that can be tedious and unimaginative, I felt.  It’s been getting generally good reviews, but some of the hype has cooled slightly since last week, I’ve noticed.

If you’re willing to switch off your brain for hours at a time, you can progress fairly quickly along seemingly limitless storylines. Your feelings when wandering around uncharted planets with only an NPC companion may range from awe to monotony. For anyone who has played games such as Battlefront II (EA), you might not be blown away by the terrain, but the flora and fauna (who not infrequently want to eat you), are fun and wonderfully weird.

You’ll get yourself bigger laser rifles, burlier and faster and more weaponized spacecrafts, and you’ll learn to craft “Chunks” (one of the ubiquitous branded foods in Starfield) and zillions of other foods, drinks, weapons and spacesuits – and more. You can build personalized outpost homes on remote, storm-swept planets. You can make octagonal “space houses” with bespoke décor and hydroponic gardens and a droid to help clean up your mess – and perhaps mow that lawn?

But the main narrative sense of forward-movingness happens as you get your character more and more deeply involved in inter-factional warfare and political melodramas, and of course, as make your fateful choices about who you want to be: A good hero, a roguish criminal, an assassin, a scientist, a politician, etc. – or a little of each or others.

For anyone familiar with Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, this will feel very familiar. Instead of “realms” and magical cities, you’ve got factional zones and planets and star-bases. But the resource-grinding and management and travel actually all feel very similar.

I ran into at least one major glitch that was incredibly frustrating. It wasn’t just me. I checked on Reddit and found that plenty of other people experiencing getting stuck on a mission. It’s early days, and Bethesda’s working out the bugs, so I’ll cut them some slack.

Space travel and resource-gathering are less fun than I’d hoped. Once you build up some skill points, it gets a little more exciting, but I found the incessant “screen-loading” transitions got old fast. I also found the NPCs and caves and outposts to be increasingly “samey” as the game proceeds, and I never felt much of an emotional connection to anyone or any storylines. The narratives somehow never reached my heart, and many of the factions such as the UC Marines and Crimson Tide pirates never offered much that we haven’t all seen before in worlds like the sprawling Star Wars universe. At times, too, the characters just seemed implausible and unreal—or irritating.

How do you fix narrative writing with too many stock-character stereotypes and irritating cliches? That’s not easy. Video games almost never transcend the very best contemporary science fiction or fantasy writing of their era, but rather mine them for inspiration. With 1,000 planets to dramatize, Bethesda may need to higher more superb science fiction and fantasy writers to find for fresher storylines and more interesting characters. But as an English professor, I would say that. I think I better go mow my lawn now.

Professor Bill Broun is the faculty advisor for the Stroud Courier. He teachers writing classes in the English Department.