STARFIELD

When Starfield launched in 2023 it was the most ambitious — and most divisive — thing Bethesda had ever made. Nearly three years and a mountain of updates later, it arrives on PS5 as a genuinely better game: smoother, deeper, and finally bundled with the surface vehicle, expanded maps, difficulty sliders and the Shattered Space expansion that the launch version was crying out for.

The pitch hasn't changed. You're a miner-turned-spacefarer who stumbles onto an alien artifact and falls in with Constellation, the galaxy's last band of starry-eyed explorers. From there the Settled Systems open up: a thousand planets across a hundred-plus star systems, four meaty faction questlines, a city-sized hub in New Atlantis, and the freedom to be a bounty hunter, a corporate spy, a pirate, an outpost tycoon, or all of them at once.

The best Bethesda toy box yet

When Starfield is good, it's exceptional. The ship builder is the deepest creative system Bethesda has ever shipped — you can spend hours bolting together a flying home, then actually fly it, board enemy vessels, and steal theirs. The faction quests are the studio's strongest writing in years; the Ryujin corporate-espionage arc and the Crimson Fleet pirate saga in particular are superb. And the central New Game Plus twist — which reframes the entire campaign as a multiverse loop — is one of the boldest swings in the genre.

On PS5 it runs and looks great, with the years of patches smoothing over the launch jank. The added Rev-8 land vehicle and the overhauled surface maps quietly fix the single biggest complaint, making planet-side exploration feel like exploration again instead of a loading-screen shuffle.

Still reaching

The flaws that split players in 2023 haven't all vanished. The thousand planets are still mostly empty, procedurally-stitched backdrops, and fast travel remains the connective tissue holding the galaxy together — this is a space game where you rarely fly between two points yourself. The main story takes too long to find its feet, and the moment-to-moment gunplay, while improved, is merely fine. Starfield asks for patience, and not everyone will want to give it.

But for trophy hunters, that scope becomes a feature. The PS5 platinum is long but low-stress: there's almost nothing missable, nothing tied to difficulty, and most of it comes naturally from doing what the game is best at — running every faction questline, building ships and outposts, and grinding your way to level 100 across multiple New Game Plus loops. It's one of the most relaxing platinums of the year, and our full roadmap below maps the fastest route.