Starfield Journal Three
I haven't finished Starfield, and I probably won't for a while, here's where I'm at with it
Starfield, Starfield, Starfield…123
One of my favorite RPG podcasts is Journal Updated from the Abnormal Mapping network. I listened to the first half of their Starfield episode when it came out but waited to finish it until I got further into the game, to avoid spoilers. I´m at 55 hours now, and have been told by the game how it intends to end.
When Starfield starts, you begin finding “artifacts” which bestow visions that seem to transport you momentarily across the universe. Then some folks start showing up whenever you are grabbing an artifact, seemingly either aliens or time travelers. I guessed time travelers, one of my companions thought that was wild. I was correct, after a fashion.
Once the artifacts are assembled, they create a portal into another universe. “O, that’s probably where New Game Plus kicks in,” I think. “yes, indeed,” confirms Journal Updated. It’s difficult to convey exactly why I find this so uninspiring, but I’ll give it a shot.
The twist that precedes this is quite good – you discover one of your pursuers is an alternate universe version of one of your companions (which one depends on the relationships you’ve developed and a choice you make in a mission shortly beforehand, which is cool) and the other is a priest, which is more compelling for a detail I know but haven’t discovered in game yet and less compelling as someone you have little in the way of a previous relationship with.4
I’d gotten the idea early on that I should rush through the story, advice I haven’t heeded and no longer seems likely to be fruitful. My main annoyance with New Game Plus being achieved by a choice you come to at the end of the main plot – despite the fact this has undoubtedly been used in games before – is that it is in line with the preponderance of comic book movies overly concerned with connecting story and lore across the commercial separations of different time periods and companies (annoying in Spider-Verse, sort of gruesome in The Flash).
Less annoyingly, this knowledge assures me that I don’t need to rush to finish the game, which is fine. My character has just begin a romantic relationship with Andreja, the House Va’Ruun spy. Her loyalty quest is fun to follow, but the dialogue in the climactic confrontation was lacking. It wasn’t poorly written on a line-to-line basis so much as that there was a measure of ambiguity in the resolution which felt more dissatisfying than thought provoking. Basically, you discover that Andreja’s old contact to House Va’Ruun has been killing her old Settled Systems explorer crew. In the notes of one of them, we discover they know who’s chasing them (which Andreja expresses they should not know). But we never learn how they figured that out. When said contact is confronted, he denies, denies, denies and threatens, but there’s some little lack of clarity as to whether there’s an actual meddling interloper or he’s just a standard symbol of institutional rot and clandestine corruption. He seems full of shit, but we didn’t really get his motives except for inferring that he didn’t like Andreja having Settled Systems friends, except that developing such relationships was key to her initial mission.
Well, anyway, I’ve recently finished the Freestar Rangers questline, most notable for the ship you get as a reward. The second-to-last time I was on their hub planet, I went to the general store and saw this rocking Va’Ruun pistol that I was determined to come back and buy, but the merchant refreshed his inventory and it has since disappeared. Too bad for me. I’m intrigued by how such a thing even came into his possession, another narrative I have to engineer because the game isn’t interested in it; I really do hope Va’Ruun plays a big part in the DLC.
Anyway, the Star Eagle is a cool ship. I recently discovered how to add cloaked storage and a signal jammer because apparently the conspiratorial notes you pick up off the body of the Va’Ruun Zealots that Andreja’s old mission lead sent after her old pals count as contraband. So, after having that taken from me, I loaded the save, looked up where to buy cloaked ship storage, flew to Red Mile, installed two cloaked storage compartments and a signal jammer, and got on my way. Is there a future in smuggling for this space scoundrel-turned-space patrolman? Almost without a doubt.
The Freestar Rangers investigation was fun and resolves with you learning the mercenary group of war veterans harassing farmers were put up to their mission by a quadrillinaoire (quintillionaire? Idk; super-rich guy in the space-faring future). The game give you several chances to let him go – he’s on the Freestar Collective Board of Governors *and* he also was trying to keep his factory thriving to keep employing the colony of workers relying on him. Characters you come across, such as his shop foreman, reconcile this matter with considerably more grace and nuance than I think he deserves. After you dispatch him, you barely even have to run out. You just talk to the foreman, she says that Hope’s second-in-command will take over, and you exit through the lobby then take off from the spaceport. HopeTech security can be overheard wondering about the company’s direction, but they don’t get in your way or even make the sort of empty threats given by the crew of Dmitri, that antique-collecting pirate I robbed of an artifact a while back.
So it goes. Promotion to full Ranger from Deputy; new spaceship that holds more crew members, except I can’t load them into it because I don’t have the top-level skill from the social tree; so I can only use three of the massive ship’s five crew stations. I also cannot assign crew to the other ship in my fleet I’m not currently flying. Have you ever heard of a fleet where only one ship is active at a time? I have not.
One of the three stations has to go to the robot Vasco, who previously did not have to be assigned to my ship to stay with it, but began having that extra requirement a few story missions back. A glitch? An update? I don’t know. Luckily, my assigned companion Andreja does not need a spot because companions are exempt.
Speaking of investigations and companions, Barrett’s investigation into the law suit aimed at his late ex-husband continues.
Sam Coe and his adorable pre-adolescent daughter Cora continue to grow on me. I’ve supplemented her exhausted book allowance and have been charged by her to bring a hard copy of any old Earth classic I can find.
This remains a sandbox RPG which relies on the player making their own fun to some extent. I have little interest in resource extraction because the only reason to do it is to build up outposts or make weapon/clothing upgrades, which requires skills I don’t presently have to make actual use of.
The narrative of my character (in my head) so far: he’s a former smuggler that was hiding out on a mining colony when he discovered an artifact that gave him a vision transporting him across the universe. He’s soon recruited by exploration society Constellation. Their investigation gets him recruited into the privateer navy of the United Colonies and the incredibly small formal police force of the Freestar Collective, which collaborates with or oversees the various private security forces on Freestar worlds. With the Vanguard, he eventually discovers how to stop the alien threat of Terrormorphs from spawning one very human-settled planet, as well as that the war criminal who led the U.C. against Freestar in their last run had been kept secretly alive and was engineering the Terrormorph attacks.
Anwyway, now Chewa Simón needs to meet up with his friends from the U.C. Xenoweapons research squad to help them on that project. In the mean time, he’s also got a mission from the Vanguard to kill more ravaging scavengers and to infiltrate the Crimson Fleet (the deadliest alliance of space pirates), a standing job offer from Ryujin Industries, an opportunity to join a street gang on Neon to fight a worse one, and more. What a to-do list.
On a meta level, Crimson Fleet infiltration seems like the last thing to get to on the list. It would complicate all the other organizational relationships in thought if not practice and what if the call to piracy is too strong to say no to?
Somehow, while multiple of these affiliations can come up in the same conversation (say you find a struggling ship and can announce yourself as Constellation, Vanguard, or Ranger before assisting; you also can bring up one or another when giving interviews at Settled Systems News Network, depending on what you’re reporting). Much like the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves’ Guild in Skyrim, I would think the overlapping and sometimes conflicting goals and responsibilities would matter more, but they typically do not. The idea that someone on a different planet or another solar system wouldn’t know the other lives you lead is definitely plausible. The game even builds it into conversation with the Vanguard that they don’t care about your external affiliations. And it makes sense wit the ethos of the respective groups -t eh Vanguard are a navy-for-hire-and-citizenship; the Rangers are small in number and great in responsibility but part of their M.O. is to avoid rocking the boat too much.
That Chewa Simón has a death mark on his head from some unknown source and is being chased by Ecliptic mercenaries and competing factions of bounty hunters (sometimes shooting one another out of the sky while his bounty grows higher) – is a mere inconvenience that in no way hampers his ability to enforce the law, or I guess investigate particularly egregious violations thereof.
Early in the game, before my listlessness drew Simón into pursuing the main storyline, I found myself meeting new people, places, and small organizations because of taking space trucking assignments off mission boards. I’m fairly certain there’s a quest open for me to join a Martian mining outfit. I’ve got a forward operating base on some planet I don’t remember extracting resources run by my former boss and coworker at the mining operation I was hiding at to start the game. As aforementioned, this particular space cowboy is more interested in combat than exploration or creation.
I still think this game would be well served by exploration and leveling working differently. As it stands, there’s a tension (as usual) between the apparent urgent demand of the core quest and the massive world you might be better off exploring. This game may do a better job with that balance than some of its peers and predecessors. You certainly don’t feel as bad not worrying about the artifacts as the threat of Terrormorphs, and the periphery quests’ nebulous relation to the core makes more sense here than, for instance, in Skyrim, where the civil war ought to have impacted the life of the Dragonborn more than I felt it did after I resolved it.
Again, I find recounting these journeys more edifying and engaging than I find actually playing them. I have upcoming work on the draw of spontaneous perpetual narratives with regard to sports games. I turned on Star Wars: Jedi Survivor and found it instantly more ingratiating than Starfield. The post-Witcher Assassin’s Creed games give me an alternate version of the omni-genre (though less adjacent to an immersive sim). I finally redid The Heist in Cyberpunk 2077 on my way to Phantom Liberty after it garnered all sorts of acclaim, and found the world better realized and the story more emotionally engaging. I have hours of Marvel’s Midnight Suns to dive into. So, my time with Starfield may not be coming to an end but almost certainly a long pause.
These are all my screenshots.
He’s supposed to be a big deal because religious Constellation member Matteo is part of his church. Turns out, according to Kirk Hamilton at Triple Click, that he founds the church after going through several versions of his own New Game Plus