Starfield Diary 1
Xbox/PC exclusive mega RPG Starfield is going to take me probably 100 hours to finish, so I'm going to update you all on my thoughts as they come to me
I am 27 hours into Starfield and I am not sure if I like it. This game has been called “Mid Christmas,” “Bethesda’s Surprising Masterpiece,” and “the death of videogames as we know them.” What I find in it is a continuation of Bethesda Game Studio’s approach to ever more expansive worlds. Its scale undercuts its usability, its scope can grate at its fun factor. You can do so many different things, but I can’t help but ask myself ‘to what end?’
Starfield is a first-person roleplaying game chock-full of gaming elements, many of them unoriginal. It is very obviously in the lineage of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and Fallout (3, 4, ’76). It could be said to relate to Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed, and the like, but has very little to do with those games besides sharing in the AAA[1] open-world action-adventure genre. Cyberpunk 2077 is the closer comparison, but we’ll come back to that in the next part of this diary, probably. The Bethesda approach to these games has always skewed more in the direction of the sandbox, where you can do many different things, and aren’t necessarily focused on the narrative objective at the core of the story – the premise is a pretense for experimentation. This is a tension within many of these games, but Bethesda has generally woven it more naturally into their presentation of their stories.
This shows up in the development, away from combat, of things like homebuilding, base building, property ownership and manage, marriage, adoption of children, and – now, in Starfield – the building and customization of ships and resource-extracting outposts. Tangential to combat and hewn closer to developing a character’s unique way in the world, Bethesda RPGs are interested in their players getting to join factions (sometimes even those at odds with one another), connecting us to the world through associations with characters invested in its happenings. The leveling system, by which the player character develops new abilities, has shifted towards a version where skill trees are laid out in a way that requires setting goals for the player to fulfil to improve the character’s capacity for movement, violence, dialogue, and other forms of interacting with the world.
It gives you a checklist because Bethesda games are checklist games. Your quest log is a checklist of things to do, you level up via checklist, and the game itself sometimes feels like its ambition is to encompass a checklist of all possibilities of the genre. An endless imagination that can feel limited because of what it can’t encompass. Bethesda has therefore made a polarizing product which alienates and astounds. Through its myriad options, it presents a media product which I think may be art even if it can be boiled down to “software.”
Starfield, maybe more than any Bethesda game before it, is content to let the player make their own fun. Its writing has been called among Bethesda’s best, and among its worst. With a single save playthrough, players can spend hundreds of hours in the game. The early impressions I heard were that the first dozen hours were slow but, honestly, I felt the first dozen hours flew by. I was enticed an dexcited. It was a bit after that I began to lose steam.
See, I get the impression many folks meant the first 12-or-so hours along the primary story quest line. I’ve been dabbling elsewhere, sowing narrative seeds and exploring the great black sea. And I find a media object, a craft product, a piece of art designed with an opportunity for everyone to have fun and which therefore is challenged by the possibility of being nothing for no one, as often happens when you try to be everything for everyone.
Rather, I think the specificity of the vision is disguised by the grandiosity of the scope. It’s big so it seems broad, giving it a sense of shallowness that might be artificial. The limitations which its breadth and scale create or invoke or can’t cover up become impassable blockages. Take, for instance, flight. In BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic, you pick a planet and fly there in a cutscene, only interrupted for surprise battle sequences. In Mass Effect, you have the added benefit of getting to scan procedurally-generated planets for resources and sometimes you land on them and take down a scavenger outpost (which you can do in Starfield). In Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (I still have not played, but aim to play, it sequel Survivor), you select a planet and the ship flies off and your character only sits down for landing. Starfield’s flight is more immersive than any of that, but because the design engine it was created in has physical rules about scale, it falls short of the immersion of No Man’s Sky, with which Starfield drew comparisons from the footage at its Microsoft showcases.
It's a victim of marketing as much as anything. Perhaps also a victim of its lineage – coming from the immersive sandbox open world branch of the RPG tree rather than the modular style of isolated levels. Therefore, the many cities and settlements being separated across planets feels newly alienating. This is exacerbated because the space flight leaves something to be desired, as the resource and speed limitations apparently intended to lend realism to the speculative fiction and/or subject to limitations of the game engine sap fun by turning it into a series of menu systems leaves much to be desired.
So is it good? Is it fun? That’s relative to what you want out of games and what you want them to be. Starfield is a masterwork in the sense of its scale, the commitment of hundreds of people over almost or more than a decade. It encompasses so many different science fiction influences and allows you, prompts you, to engage with them in ways you could not when they were short stories, novels, films, shows, comics. But the vastness creates an illusion of authorlessness which is almost incidentally admirable. It is a sense of freedom and wonder for some, a sense of grave disappointment for others. To me, it seems you have to either be impressed or find it fitting. Being underwhelmed seems acceptable but genuine disappointment surprises me. That’s splitting hairs, though. Surely, I can’t claim to be too wise to be let down. I’m not floating above everyone else’s experience.
But I’m relatively early going, and I intend to write more about how this game makes me feel, and if indeed it does. I sit the culmination of promise or does it end up a let down exemplifying bad design habits?
Time will tell.
I said before that there was something admirable about the sense of not being an authored experience.
Videogames are frequently narrative art, but that’s not all they are. They are, first and foremost, interactive. From visual novels to sports games, the key property across genre is that they are a medium and artform wherein the audience is involved in expressing the art. Audiences don’t just passively experience and interpret games; they require a basic level of engagement, even if it does not always require sophisticated interpretation.
Games as a site of player expression do not mean the player need to be allowed to do anything or everything – that’s not quite possible, as hard as AAA open world RPG-type games try. Still, the options we have and the limits imposed on us are choices by developers to give us a world to play in and push on. The medium videogames are most often compared to is film because they’re frequently longform continuous narratives, despite that they typically take as long to complete as one or several seasons of television.
Starfield is a game that might be wrongly attributed to one man, BGS president and Starfield director Todd Howard. But, for whatever else it is, it is too large to believe it all sprang from the mind of one man without anyone else’s input or interpretation. Yet the idea auteurs have collaborators is hardly novel. The sense a player has countless, numerous if not infinite, opportunities to impress themselves on the world, is a gift not just of choice and immersion to the player from the development team. It is a gift of shared authorship in crafting the narrative. Starfield is a spacefaring action adventure game centered on a treasure hunt. But it lets you tell that story as you see fit.
Continue With Starfield Diary 2
[1] “AAA” or “triple-A” is the phrase used to denote the most expensive games, the “mainstream” of the video games industry