Starfield

Starfield made me realise how much I need a world to feel like a place. I'd land on a planet, drive a rover to a point of interest, and find the same abandoned lab as the last one. I kept missing the hand-built towns of earlier Bethesda games. Ship building and faction questlines are solid, and the scale is real. But menus and loading screens chop travel into pieces. It's here because Game Pass value is high. Fans of the studio will forgive a lot.

I went into Starfield expecting the game Bethesda had teased for a decade and came out feeling like I'd gotten most of one. That's not nothing. I sank plenty of hours in anyway. The scale is genuinely enormous, a universe rather than a world, but loading screens between planets keep breaking the illusion of one seamless place, unlike Skyrim's map. Exploration on individual planets runs thin too, procedural terrain without enough handcrafted content to reward wandering the way Elden Ring does. The questlines are solid Bethesda writing, and ship building hooked me longer than expected. It ranks here for scale and ambition, not for the discovery it promised.