If there is one hilarious discourse that appeared prior to the early access launch of Starfield, it was the one about its UI. More specifically, the title screen of the game. The massive space RPG has a rather simplistic start screen, showing the name, a planet, and your various menu options on the left. But what if I told you the start screen in Starfield isn’t the problem?
In fact, I would argue that the Starfield start screen is fun, simple, and attractive in its own way, despite certain developer opinions. While I immediately noticed how subtle it is when I first booted up the game, it by no means bothered me. However, there are other parts of the Starfield UI, which are arguably much more problematic.
Screenshot by Siliconera
Starfield’s Font and Menus are the True UI Issues
For one, the font size in Starfield is horrific. The actual font style isn’t great on its own, but the font size is the true culprit here. Sure, there is a way to increase the font size for the menus in the settings, but this only affects the actual menus for some reason.
There is no way to increase the font subtitles for things like conversations and dialogue further from my experience, which is a shame since the menu text has this option. It resulted in me often playing the game through remote play on my tablet or sitting up close to my TV, even with my prescription glasses on.
If that isn’t enough, the general menus in Starfield are frustrating to deal with. They are quite bland, and traversing the menus is troublesome. I often had issues figuring out which item category I was browsing at the moment due to how the sections stack on one another. I would have to back out, make sure I was in the right spot where boost packs are versus the helmets and so on.
To make matters worse, some items are classified in truly bizarre manner. For instance, you have Digipicks, the items you use to pick locks and computers, in the miscellaneous section where mostly junk is found. This is a problem when you can accidentally sell Digipicks quite easily to sellers when trying to get rid of junk. This was the only item there that I would often accidentally sell, so it would have made more sense in a place like resources where all of the items are generally valuable.
It isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy my time with Starfield. On the contrary, it is one of the best RPGs in the past decade. But it could have been much smoother and more entertaining with some key UI improvements and more accessibility options in general. After all, the Starfield start screen isn’t the issue.
Starfield is available for the Xbox Series X and PC.
