October's RPS Game Club pick is... Starfield!

A new month means a new RPS Game Club pick, and since a lot of us are still playing Bethesda's epic space RPG, albeit to varying degrees of success, I thought I'd anoint Starfield as our selection for October. And yes, that will probably mean more creepy dad adventures are in the offing. Apologies in advance.

How to describe Starfield? It is both a vast and sprawling space adventure with more planets to visit than we have hours left in existence, and also one of the most conservative (and one might even say intensely repetitive) RPGs for quite some time. Alice Bee summarised it brilliantly in her Starfield review, saying that it's so big, it ends up feeling really quite small as a result. But even if none of us in the RPS Treehouse truly love Starfield in the same way we do, say, Baldur's Gate 3, I still think it's a fascinating game that's ripe for discussion - and the RPS Game Club is a great place to do it.

After having a weird outer body experience with some kind of sci-fi artefact Macguffin, Starfield begins by whisking you off to join the ranks of Constellation, a group of interplanetary explorers who are intent on getting to the bottom of these mysterious metal planks. I'm still working my way through the main questline, but so far I've found its best stories lie elsewhere in its copious faction quests and side missions, and I'm hoping to dig into a couple of these in detail over the course of the month.

If you have Game Pass, I'd absolutely recommend checking out Starfield on there, if you don't own it already. Otherwise, it's a fair old wodge at £60/$70. And if you need help getting it to run well, hardware editor James has you covered with his best PC settings guide. Just don't try to play it on Steam Deck (or install it on a HDD), as it's sadly a frontier too far for Valve's handheld.

If you don't have Game Pass, fear not. We hope you'll join along anyway with our end of month liveblog discussion, where you can ask us questions about it and get a sense from the rest of the RPS community whether it's something worth playing further down the line. We'll also be writing some further articles about it over the course of the coming weeks, so watch out for those as well.

So go forth and (try to) have fun! We'll reconvene at the RPS Treehouse liveblog lodge at the end of the month to talk all about it.