Starfield hyperventilation

The shoe finally drops

I've been cautiously frosty on the latest outing by Bethesda for quite a while now, never quite fully buying into their vast vision for the new face of the company because, honestly, it just wasn't the kind of game that I wanted it to be. Loving Elder Scrolls more than Fallout, I really wanted that Fantasy element to populate their first full throated foray into Space- but alas we're closer to Sci-fi, even more so than Fallout ever was. I just thought that Starfield sounded limited on some regards and over ambitious in others, which would be fine enough of a concoction if I held any belief in Bethesda's ability to consistently deliver. But, well... You remember what Fallout 76 turned out like, surely? How Fallout 4 missed the mark? How the only new Elder Scrolls game we've received in the past 10 years has been Blades? It just hasn't felt like Bethesda have that it factor anymore, and before the Starfield Direct last week I was entering in iffy expecting to leave just a little bit happier.

There's an elaborate game when it comes to this season of game presentations. A delicate dance of words rich with jargon and pageantry in good humoured competition over the attention of the public. Showing off enough new games of varying genres to speak to as many differing sectors of your potential crowd as possible, picking the right time to showcase the titles with the right balance of gameplay versus cinematics, loading the heavy hitters just before points where viewers might get bored all whilst holding on to the almighty 'one more game' showstopper that you have to end on. These might seem like the idle inanities of marketing, but for whatever reason the industry has always been supremely obsessed with the imagery of being the one who 'won E3', or in this sense: 'won Summer Games fest'. Be the publisher who made other publisher jealous and has the industry looking up to you for inspiration. Placing Starfield as Microsoft's 'one more game' was a big statement after a showcase that unveiled Persona 3 Reload, Fable, Star Wars Outlaws and Clockwork Revolution. Was Starfield really big enough to stand head and shoulder above everything else?

Well after a forty five minute presentation (yes, forty five minutes!) I think it's safe to say no-one is in any doubt about either the size of Starfield and how they feel about it. We know practically everything about how this RPG is themed, where it puts the emphasis of it's design, the emotions it intends to draw out of it's players and the many inspirations the title seems to wear proudly on it's sleeve. If you aren't into space adventure games- the presentation must have been tortuous for you. For me, on the otherhand, I finally had my third eye opened to the potential of Starfield and can happily admit that I was wrong- this is the game I want it to be. Okay, actually I was half wrong. It still would have been ten times better if the game had alien races. But we make do with what we have, I guess.

Starfield very much does seem to be a coagulation of every single wild and errant idea that Bethesda have had in all their years making RPG games, as well as some concepts they've whole heartedly stolen from similar games. The comprehensive and vast building systems, utilised in the ship builder and outpost maker, is borrowed and evolved right out of Fallout 4 and 76- taking a modular snap-build system and evolving it to the level of high level engineer framework in the blink of an eye. (Kerbal Space Program- eat your heart out!) The composition of the world geography borrows that wonderous grandeur and colourful diversity of the Elder Scrolls games, harkening back to Skyrim in scale, Oblivion in scope and Morrowind for the imagination of the crazy animal alien inhabitants. And even the ship combat, a balance of power allocation and 3D flight, looks just like what we remember from Space game monoliths like 'Elite Dangerous'.

I think the word most aptly employed to describe what we saw was coined by one of the developers themselves. Vast. Providing somewhere over 1000 worlds to explore, procedural generation content, RPG character levelling, ship building, basic crew management, exploration hot pockets, resource collection, and a trailing narrative that is probably going to shape up as a bit of a disappointment knowing Bethesda's track record with main story line quests. In many ways the identity of Starfield is in the act of being ambitious itself. In pushing the scale of a Bethesda world across entire planets Starfield threatens to either surplant everything we think we know about Bethesda open world titles or show the constraints of the Bethesda formula once it buckles under it's own weight.

In my most cynical moments I see this as yet another trepidatious limb thrown out in front of the 'radiant AI' systems which has granted us some of the most repetitive content in modern RPGs. Endless lifeless bandit bounty hunts for terrible gold, Preston Garvey constantly sending us traipsing around the wastes helping some colony solve another meaningless problem. But on the otherhand I see the history of Bethesda working with systems like these for even longer than when they came out and made it obvious. For example, generation systems were employed to allow Bethesda to create so many Oblivion dungeons back in the hey day of the 360 genre of games, when people didn't even know what those words meant- and I can see that as practice material to give them the scope they need to pull Starfield off. And at the end of the day I think that is going to be the make or break, how well the procedural generation content can fool us into thinking it's hand-placed and of consequence.

Of course there's the bugs too, but we've heard some interesting feedback on that regard. As they now have partners within Xbox, it's been said from associated parties that according to the data they're receiving, Starfield has less bugs than any other Bethesda game before has shipped with. But of course that just sounds like marketing mumbo-jumbo, right? It's impossible for the average consumer to fact-check the number of bugs a game has in accurate detail and thus any number of wild claims can be made, who's to say that Starfield would be as clean as they claim when it can't be proved? Well- there's rumours that before Xbox stepped in this title was actually due to release earlier. Much earlier, in fact. As in, perhaps a couple of years earlier. Xbox's input might have not been to delay the game for some last minute additions to the scope, but rather to add another length of rope so Bethesda can put Nintendo-levels of polish atop this product. Make it gleam like brand-spanking new! 

It has been so very long since we've seen a game that would be considered that system seller type title. Not just a paragon of it's genre, a remake of a classic, but a title which crosses genres, draws wonder and awe, and also happens to be a console exclusive. (But it is also coming to PC because Xbox aren't total bottom feeders yet.) Bethesda always have that appeal, but this release threatens to push beyond the veil once again and expand their fanbase to new heights. To alight the passions of everyone's wonder, to explore a universe larger and more grand than any before and to remind us all what it's like to be giddy again. Heck, I'm already giddy just thinking about it. Just formulating a concept of the sorts of experiences I want to have, the ships I will build, the space explorer I want to be. And it's less than 3 months away? Whelp- 2023 is going to be a hell of a year for gamers!