Starfield was the best xbox game this year, and one of my favorites from 2023 alongside Resident Evil 4 and Pizza Tower. Finished it today actually, and as I look back at my journey I feel like it was a great time. Top notch art direction and soundtrack, cool guns and combat system, a lot of choices and the characters make commentaries in a lot of stuff considering there’s a lot of quests in this game. The bad stuff is overall performance and lack of cinematic approach in talking scenes, immersion breaking exploration because of the many menu systems and fast travel dependency. And I feel like many of its systems doesn’t talk well with each other, they’re there if you wanna engage (for example, I beat the game by focusing on exploration and the actual rpg story content, and I didn’t need to build an original ship or outposts at all, the game doesn’t force you to engage with a lot of things, which is good and bad when we think about it…). But boy, these things aside, I rly liked the game, if you focus on exploring the cities and settlements you will probably have a great time, there’s so much to do and discover between all the handcrafted content.

So many cool stories (mantis, operation starseed, juno’s gambit, groundpounder, first contact…), the ending and overall story was cool and made me think alot, I reflected about my whole life, because there’s this whole theme of making peace with your past, searching for the unknown, finding your place in the universe, what are we here for and what’s important for us as individuals. And all of this in a hopeful manner… The world of Starfield has such a cool down to earth lore, where you can find so many pieces of story from our own species, like NASA stuff or some space exploration we did in the last century. I see it as a game that celebrates space, while approaching the sci-fi genre in a positive way, there’s hope everywhere in this universe.

Constellation had a lot of great characters, loved Andreja, Sarah, Barret, Walter, Matteo… They had cool and believable sidequests overall too.

UC Vanguard and Crimson Fleet faction quest storylines were some of the Bethesda ever wrote, great stuff. The main quest final segments were awesome too.

As for the rest, Hifi Rush is amazing, loved it. Forza Motorsport is bad overall, but feels great to play the actual game when it works, the driving is some of the best I’ve ever seen in a simcade racing game, it’s great fun (again, when it works, because I hate some choices they’ve done in the new Forza, like these always online, performance, game breaking bugs that keep removing progress, boring career mode…)