Starfield versus No Man's Sky

 Is there going to be room for both?

What's that they're going around calling it? No Man's Starfield or something equally as unimaginative? Meme as they might, the people of the Internet do have something of a point, the game that Bethesda purposes to be capable of making bares some very striking similarities to the Hello Games opus that struggled to get where it is today. It's no passing resemblance either, gameplay systems, design interfaces, even a rough resemblance in the framing device of the story. (although 'trying to solve an intergalactic mystery by diving into abandoned relics' isn't exactly all that creative on it's own. And something tells me that Starfield has no interest fawning itself over 'Simulation Theory' in the same way that NMS lionizes.) So I guess the question I'm coming to ask is whether or not this game has any chance of cutting into NMS' market share and if there might be a space for both of them when it is all said and done. So this might not necessarily be a comparison per se; especially given that one of the games I'm talking about isn't even nearly released yet, but more a supposition identifying potential to-be-stepped-on toes.

First off; wow, Bethesda pretty much stole NMS' basic premise word for word. Jumping around the stars to track down planets which you can mine for resources to help you keep moving. Starfield even utilises a similar scan interface and mining laser, the only real difference I can see off the bat is that there won't be any terrain deformation at all in comparison to the little that Starfield offers. Tablescraps of world deformation as it were. And Todd himself even mentioned how some planets in the game are going to just be resources dumps without anything interesting or useful on them, similar to 99.9% of the landspace in No Man's Sky. At least I can say that Starfield doesn't appear to be billing itself up as a survival style game the way that NMS does (that CO2/O2 gauge appears to just be a stamina bar) which means that resource hoarding might not become a key stable of the gameplay loop as it does with NMS. However we do know that our spaceships actually run on fuel, so maybe there will be a bit of never ending resource hunting...

The sizes of the playspaces are similarly mind boggling, if not actually similar in scale. The 1000 worlds of Starfield does sound more enticing than the 18 quintillion of No Man's Sky; simply because we know Bethesda and their history with procedural generation technology has a better chance of making that 1000 feel at least a little interesting to explore. Maybe I'll visit ten before the loop makes me bored instead of the two I experienced in No Man's Sky. Although we don't currently know how well those systems will be implemented until we get ourselves a trailer detailing all of that, which Bethesda assures is very much on the way at some point in the near future. Still, the implication is that procedural generation is the backbone of these worlds and where No Man's Sky lacked in this department thanks to the sheer scale they were simulating over, Bethesda's much smaller chunk of space could, theoretically, support their dreams.

One manner in which No Man Sky is largely superior to Starfield is when it comes to the freedom of ship travel, in that ships in NMS can fly from the surface of a planet and into space through a completely seamless transition; which is absolutely not the case with Starfield. We will pick our landing locations from a free picking menu screen in orbit and consequently struggle to find the same place twice without slapping down an outpost or map marker. There's definitely a sense of instant gratification which NMS offers that Starfield is willingly missing out on for the sake of their ailing tech, and I just know that my decision to land on certain planets that have nothing of actual interest to be is going to be highly affected by that loading screen. Even if it's only a few seconds, like it hopefully is, that segmentation is a momentum killer, and that kind of sucks.

On the complete other end of the pendulum, we have combat. Yes, we've all commented on how wooden the Starfield combat looks, especially with that pathetic excuse for a combat slide; but lest I need to remind you, NMS combat is an afterthought of game design. The same mechanics that go into using your mining laser are retrofitted into a clunky feeling gun system that, after several years of patches at this point, I'm convinced is far beyond help. At least if things in Starfield are shored up to the level that Fallout 4 was we can expect to have the odd thrilling gun fight under the right circumstances because F4 is a half decent shooter at it's best moments; No Man's Sky makes ground combat a chore and flight combat, though slightly better feeling, doesn't yet have the depth to sustain dedication play. And the word 'yet' is a key to my next major point.

Hello Games has no other real obligations beyond No Man's Sky. We've heard trickle that they have a new ambitious project in the works, but NMS is their baby for now and presumably the distant future. That means it is a live service, constantly evolving and improving whilst Starfield only really has one moment to stick it's landing. There will be DLC probably, and patches to fix the most glaring bugs, but the makeup of the world is unlikely to significantly change from the actions of the developers. NMS has it's limitation of what it can be, and I think Starfield will forever be a better combat game, but the future for NMS is limitless whilst Starfield has a coming finish line ahead of it before Bethesda have to move onto their next game. Fingers crossed they pull a Skyrim and make a game worthy of being played for the next decade; but that is a tall ask for a brand new IP even made by a big company. If you want future prospects, maybe NMS is more the way to go.

And finally there's the interaction with the world and fiction of the game world. NMS falls hard on it's face here and I think it always will. There is no sense of cohesion anywhere in the galaxy and there's no real place to insert lore or character in a world designed to be given value almost solely by other players. Just like with Fallout 76, the limit of NMS is the society that players create, only there's considerable limits to exactly what players can establish. Can we set up ingame ecosystems? No. Build trade outposts? Nope. Found bustling towns? Negative. There will never be a semblance of a world to immerse yourself in within the fiction of NMS, beyond the fantasy of being an intrepid explorer with no plateau ever in sight. Starfield has that fictional world, with it's factions, cities, history and people. There's something to immerse yourself within in the Starfield world and that slight reaching out by the game to meet the reaching from the player is probably going to make a world like this more appealing to those who like their immersive worlds to lose themselves in.

So there are similarities between the two games and Bethesda themselves seem to be trying to sell Starfield as a successor to NMS, whether they acknowledge that or not; but I believe that the two games are built to serve differing consumer bases. NMS feeds a gameplay loop of exploration, not always for exploration's sake (when the resource table is concerned) but it offers little more than that. Bethesda is making more of a world to interact with and care about, something that plays at, although I suspect will fall short of, an expansion on the Freelancer formula. Which yes, in a way means that if it ever is actually made, there will be a place for Star Citizen in this new ecosystem of space games too. In conclusion, there's no reason to butt the heads of games that can be totally perfect neighbours in the industry to come.