Warning: Contains spoilers pertaining to faction plot-lines.
Okay cards on the table: I am one of those insufferable types who will rant your face off about how much better Morrowind was than either Oblivion or Skyrim, and I found myself somewhat mystified by all the glowing praise heaped upon Skyrim on its release when all I could see was all the areas it stepped backwards from Oblivion. I disliked the streamlining of attributes down to just “health, stamina, magic”. I disliked the streamlining of skills down to perk trees. That entire schools of magic were obliterated and many of the others nerfed. That the game was desperate for you to experience *everything* it had to offer, railroading you into joining all the factions leaving very little to organically discover. And above all, I found the stories to be rather uninteresting – attempts at drama falling flat due to robotically queued voice lines often horribly timed with events onscreen, and no feeling that any of these world-shaking events were having any consequences at all on the citizens. All that said, I’ve racked up a ridiculously huge number of hours playing it, so clearly I enjoyed it despite all that – but much of that stems from the thriving modding community.
Unlike Skyrim, reception to Starfield seems more split. Perhaps this is partly because game commentary and critique is a much more pervasive thing now than it was then, perhaps because expectations for these big releases are higher now. In any case, here I find myself in the unusual position for me of thinking, huh – Bethesda have done a really good job of this one.
In my most humblest of opinions, Starfield is the most solid Bethesda game to date. It has all of the ambitions we’ve come to associate with these open-world Bethesda titles but this time, I think they’ve actually nailed it. It still feels like a Bethesda game – the basic framework is the same as any of their recent Elder Scrolls or Fallout games with a main quest, a handful of factions, chems being useful and food and cooking bafflingly useless, and a crafting and construction system building on what they did for Fallout 4. It feels complete, it’s fun, I’ve encountered the fewest bugs of any Bethesda game, and this is the biggest step forward in visuals to date. Were I a journalist I would have no qualms what-so-ever about slapping a 10/10 on it, but does that mean I have no criticisms? Lol, no.
Bethesda are not known for their particularly amazing main quest storylines and Starfield is no exception. I will grant, however, that I admire that they shot for some pretty lofty philosophical themes but unfortunately those themes are not explored in any meaningful way. I wrote, a while back, about how much I really liked how a New Game+ mechanic was seamlessly integrated into the story of Dragon’s Dogma – Starfield is built around the same basic concept but ultimately I do not find it as praiseworthy or compelling. I think the key difference in how the experience lands is scale. Dragon’s Dogma structured the entire game around this concept and centred it all on you. The entire story, the ending contextualising the opening, the end of the story marking just the beginning of all the post-game content. It really felt like a game intended to be played over and over.
Starfield just doesn’t have that same level of post-game content. There’s doing all the quests that you might have missed in your first playthrough, and levelling up powers requires multiple playthroughs. But none of that really adds anything, particularly since it’s easy to forget you even have powers, and there’s no enemies, factions, or quests which require you to be so high-level that they can only really be tackled on a second or third play. Ultimately, then, the New Game + structure of the game really just burdens the game with having the sort of plot which, if I were tasked with writing a sequel, I would be cursing the person who came up with it.
By far, the most interesting stories come in the form of the factions – any one of those could have been elevated to the main quest and, in my opinion, the game would’ve been better for it. The quest-lines in Starfield boil down to a bunch of setup run-of-the-mill quests, and then one show-piece event. In the Crimson Fleet quest-line it’s the ship where you find Jasper Kryx and then have to escape as the ship starts to explode. The main quest, that equivalent is exploring the NASA building, complete with authentic museum pieces. In the Vangard, it’s going to Londinion. All these moments do is really make apparent how much potential has been wasted in these quest-lines. In another game, the Terrormorph threat would have been *the* primary threat of the game, particularly when you come to know the origin of them. Instead, outside of joining the Vangard, the Terrormorphs basically do not exist unless you happen upon one of the locations that quest-line would have taken you to.
That all said, I do rather admire that Bethesda chose to make a game without the sort of world-ending threat they normally do. The NASA-punk vibe, centring the story around an exploration group, it’s clear that they’re shooting for a more hard sci-fi vibe and I really like that this is the direction they chose to go. But you have to dive into that stuff for it to land – you can’t just sprinkle in some general philosophical themes and get 2001: A Space Odyssey, you need to really commit to it.
Incredibly nit-picky aside: It bothers me that you can eat a burger while standing on a moon with no atmosphere while wearing a space helmet. Also that your spacesuit seems to be terrible at keeping microbial infections at bay because you stood in a puddle, yet terrific at preventing catastrophic punctures because you’ve been shot by a projectile weapon. Is this The Expanse or Star Wars?
In the lore of the game you become aware of a man called Vae Victis regarded by some people as a hero, and others as a murderer depending on which side of the war they were on. It’s a familiar idea and it’s always interesting to explore figures like this in fiction. In the Vangard quest-line, it transpires that after the war when he was supposed to have been executed for his war crimes, instead he was secretly squirreled away in a top secret prison facility and you meet him in a manner reminiscent of Hannibal Lector or Raymond Reddington from the TV series The Blacklist. Like the latter, the logic is that the man has value in the intel he provides of wanted fugitives he knew from the war. So far, so good, if a bit derivative. However, what ultimately should come down to murky ethics where you can feel, “okay that wasn’t very nice but greater good, etc, etc” or “sometimes you’ve just got to pick the least bad of two horrible options” he was eventually revealed just to be a borderline psychopath who is utterly indefensible. Yes, he has helped end the Terrormorph threat but this threat is entirely of his making in the first place. Considering his clone / daughter is a major character in this plot-line, there should be some conflict between us in how to deal with Victis. It seems to me that she should either hate the man despite his actions being justifiable from one perspective, or feel a bond to the man despite his actions being indefensible. Either option would potentially put your decision at odds with her feelings – instead she hates him, he’s a monster, we’re good.
I bring this quest-line up specifically because I feel that it is emblematic of the way Bethesda approach stories and characters. They want these big themes, but they also want to play incredibly safely. Yes companions can like or dislike actions you make or dialogue options you choose, but ironically this makes them feel more robotic not less, since how they react to things is a hard-coded consequence of their archetype. There is no opportunity to justify your action, that okay yes I know you don’t like stealing however in this instance, etc, etc. Every time I think about Bethesda companions I find myself thinking back to Boone from Fallout: New Vegas – a character who had a refreshing amount of darkness to him and whose friendship ultimately felt earned. I do not feel it a coincidence that this game was not made by Bethesda themselves.
The problem for Bethesda is that in the eight years since Fallout 4 released, and certainly in the thirteen since Skyrim, games have moved on quite a lot in their storytelling and presentation. I remember writing in an earlier blog post about how it would be interesting to see how Bethesda change their approach to their games in a post-The Witcher 3 landscape. The answer is, not at all. Articles are now popping up comparing Starfield unfavourably to Cyberpunk 2077 in terms of characters, character interaction, and animation quality. Personally, I find this comparison a little unfair – yes there is a mile-wide chasm between the two in whole swathes of areas but specifically when it comes to stories and characters well, this just isn’t what Bethesda do. Starfield was never going to be a game with emotionally engaging characters or a particularly amazing storyline – no Bethesda game has ever had those things. I’m pretty confident that no-one on Earth played or plays Skyrim for the story. Bethesda simply make fun sandbox environments with copious amounts of busy-work and extensive lore, none of it setting the world alight but still weirdly satisfying if you like that sort of thing. The gap between Bethesda open-world games and your Cyperpunks, Witchers, Red Dead Redemptions, and whatever else comes along will only continue to widen. But if I travelled to the parallel Universe where Bethesda have an entirely new engine, create CD Projekt RED level facial animation, have no floating animal bugs, no badly placed dialogue cameras so that you’re looking at a wall instead of the person speaking… I genuinely think I would miss old Bethesda. Their games are like a childhood blanket to me. It might have holes in it and be faded, but it’s more comforting than the objectively superior blankets available, so I know which one I’ll be snuggling up with.