Highlights
- A Starfield log in Bethesda's latest game has highlighted a major annoyance with how quests are handled, particularly those that start by overhearing conversations.
- The game features a vast universe with over a thousand planets and countless activities to discover, but the current implementation of the quest system has left many fans frustrated with their disorderly journals.
- Suggestions from players include adding meaningful quest descriptions to the log and the ability to sort side activities by their current distance, which would make prioritizing tasks less frustrating. Existing mods do not address this issue yet.
A Starfield log that recently started making the rounds on social media underlines one major annoyance with the way Bethesda's latest title handles quests. While the fandom has already pointed out a number of problems in Starfield, this newly highlighted issue might be an easier fix than most such grievances.
Bethesda's games were never lacking in content, but its space-faring RPG truly pushes the envelope in this respect, featuring over a thousand planets across dozens of galaxies filled with both handcrafted and procedurally generated points of interest to explore. This vast universe is also permeated by countless activities, with Starfield allowing players to discover quests in a plethora of ways.
And while most such methods of finding missions are fairly immersive, some fans still feel like the underlying system could use a bit more work, especially in regard to how Starfield handles quests that start by overhearing conversations, of which there are many. The problem with Bethesda's current implementation of this mechanic was recently exemplified by Reddit user FlamesOfAzure, who shared a screenshot of their mission journal – a "log" in the game's jargon – that's filled with all-too-many nondescript activities, most of which are instructing them to chat up a long list of names.
And while the player seemingly posted the screenshot in jest by humorously describing it as the result of walking past "too many mouthy NPCs," their joking remark was promptly propelled to the front page of the r/Starfield subreddit, suggesting that many other fans are also annoyed with their ever-disorderly journals. Some of those players used this as an opportunity to plead with Bethesda to add meaningful quest descriptions to the log, while others suggested the ability to sort such side activities by their current distance.
The latter proposal would presumably be straightforward to implement, not least because the game already supports checking the latest target destination of any given quest. However, doing so is hidden behind a command that opens up a planet map, so unless the player decides to pursue the tracked quest, they'll have to return to the top of the unruly log and continue checking each individual mission, which makes prioritizing activities needlessly annoying. And while Bethesda itself is advising Starfield players not to ignore the game's side content, even heeding that advice religiously won't prevent most logs from getting filled to the brim with nondescript tasks due to the sheer prevalence of quests that start by overhearing offhand NPC remarks.
Regardless of whether the developer decides to revisit its quest system, PC players might be able to alleviate the issue in due time through modding. However, no existing Starfield mods attempt to tackle the journal interface, and it remains to be seen whether any such customizations arrive before the RPG's official modding tools are out in 2024.
Starfield is available now for PC and Xbox Series X/S.