Gene Roddenberry’s final frontier was videogames’ first. Since 1962 and Steve Russell’s Spacewar!, the medium has been unable to resist gazing up at the firmament, regularly situating itself amid the stars. At times when playing Bethesda’s longgestating RPG, it’s hard not to marvel at how far we’ve come in 61 years. From a single-screen shootout set within a planet’s Hill’s sphere to an entire explorable universe in which you can define your own place – whether it’s as a buccaneer or a botanist, a hunter of bounty, beasts or bugs (of which there are rather fewer than you’d expect from this particular developer).

The pitch is alluring; the potential enormous. But, as is customary for a Bethesda RPG, it begins in more humble surroundings. Working for a mining corporation named Argos – happily, you’re able to locate resources rather quicker than its present-day namesake – you spend your first moments lasering rocks for ore until you come into contact with a mysterious artefact that gives you a consciousness-expanding vision. Your experience sees you brought under the wing of Constellation, a group of explorers keen to investigate the secrets of the universe, their goals immediately aligned with the player’s own.

By which time you might already feel a mild pang of concern – the traditional Bethesda step-into-the-light moment sees you emerge from those murky caves onto a beige planet, set against a sky painted in, well, a marginally different shade of beige. Next to your emergence from Cyrodiil’s sewers or the moment you exit Vault 101 and the sun-blasted Capital Wasteland comes into view, it’s an underwhelming start. Having been generously gifted a craft, you’re soon welcomed to your first spaceport and the lodge that will become your home, as you set out on a hunt for more mystical MacGuffins. Yet Atlantic City is the dreariest urban space we’ve encountered in some time – such that you wonder if it’s actually designed to encourage you to escape it at the first possible chance.

It’s been said that the best way to approach Starfield is to race through that central questline and hasten the endgame. This is terrible advice, the sort of unhelpful suggestion you might get from someone who has perhaps played the game long enough to have forgotten that the only way to make the repetitive and often dull core missions more palatable is to interleave them with some of the great many optional quests and side activities. Scattered along the critical path, these are available to pursue at your leisure, so long as you don’t mind your to-do list growing increasingly unmanageable. Asides range from a spot of corporate espionage to serving as intermediary between the occupants of a 200year-old colony ship and the inhabitants of the planet on which they were hoping to settle (the compromise in our case, a period of indentured servitude, is accepted with unlikely grace). There’s reassurance in the knowledge that jobs aren’t as hard to come by in three centuries’ time – at least if you’re happy to join the space police. Their relentless recruitment drive might tempt you to throw your lot in with the Crimson Fleet, though going undercover among this band of space pirates results in one of the more satisfying questlines. Indeed, the extended, multi-mission quest strands for the five main galactic factions are among the game’s best.