Take a look at New Atlantis, the crown jewel of the star-studded space age city, and you’ll find the usual utopian futuristic vision. A spotless landing strip greets newcomers, gleaming cream-coloured buildings dotted with lush trees, and a gleaming central high-rise that curves upwards toward the stars. Get a little closer and you can see that the slap sitting among them is a bank, squeezed into an otherwise idyllic scene.
At least, it could be a bank. Decorating the outside of the building, and found elsewhere on another unknown planet, is the half-finished word “GalB-“. The rest of the text is hidden, but a character creation preview video released last October nearly completes the missing signage: “You have a luxurious, customizable house on a peaceful planet!” Read the character traits of your dream home. “Unfortunately it comes with a 50,000 credit mortgage from GalBank which has to be paid weekly”.
everything we see starry sky What I’ve been most impressed with over the past few months is GalBank and the mortgage system that comes with it. It hints at a much larger in-game economy than has appeared in previous Bethesda releases – possibly including an entire loan system and accessible bank branches spread across Starfield’s many worlds. It’s a dose of financial reality, and I hope the team at Bethesda will have room to expand so they can fully explore the sheer weight of our spaceflight future.
At first glance, though, it all seems a little odd. In a world that takes as many cues from Buck Rogers’ muddy adventures as SpaceX’s succinct aesthetic, it seems odd that banking literally towers over the sky — an unexpected and unrealistic twist on the final frontier of freedom. welcome sign. Starfield looks ready to let you enter the financial world, even before you give your character a name or strap on a space boot to explore its utopian world – something Hardspace: Shipbreaker has done before, and it works well . But whose utopia do banks exist in, let alone sell stingy weekly repayment plans for undisclosed fees?
Apparently in Starfield’s “NASA Punk” universe. Bethesda’s vision of the future is here and now. It should be “relevant”; extrapolations from our own world and the renewed interest in space travel that has emerged over the past few decades. Bethesda says it wants the game’s 1,000-planet-wide universe to feel “believable, perhaps not always popular, but at least familiar.”
As brutal as it sounds, an overbearing financial system might be just what creates those familiar pockets in an alien universe. Today’s aerospace industry has evolved into a billionaire’s plaything. No longer the scene of ideological struggles of the last century, human flight to the stars is a way for the world’s richest to live out their childhood fantasies, or to sell those fantasies to the slightly less wealthy super-rich through tourism.
With private industry now leading rocket launches, future cosmic life is entangled with the financial institutions that fund the space race for today’s billionaires, and it’s not a leap of the imagination. While Starfield is certainly not the kind of game that simulates the financial complexities of business, you don’t need to delve into RPG territory to understand how the genre’s classics use basic in-game economies to effectively liven up their worlds.
soft Baldur’s Gate, for example, peddles the dangers of the Sword Coast by subtly distributing gold stashes behind tough enemies and distant encounters. A few precious resources in the first few hours of your adventure can mean the difference between a safe night’s sleep in a hotel, or a risky long rest on the side of the road that leaves you ambushed in the middle of the night. Splurge your funds prematurely and you’ll soon discover why travelers are rarely seen on the road at night.
Then there’s empire building at the macro level Mount and Blade This charts your journey from wayward vagabond to upstart vassal and eventually ruler of your own realm. When the toughest mercenaries and most loyal companions are available at the right price, this game is as much a challenge of astute financial management as it is a test of combat. Waste your gold on incompetent soldiers or buy flashy items for your characters, and you’ll experience just how ruthless Calradia’s feudal food chain can be.
Even Bethesda’s own The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall has an unusually strong financial system. Stroll to one of the many banks scattered around the world, and you can open an account between adventures to store your hefty gold, or open a letter of credit to move your coffers from one region to another. In what now looks like a precursor to the Starfield financial system, Daggerfall’s banks could lend gold at 10% to cover the cost of a house. While defaulting on payments, your reputation with the city will gradually decline until you pay them back.
Taken in isolation, the money-making ideas of these games are not what makes them special, and some are seriously lacking. In the first or second chapter of Baldur’s Gate, savvy is crucial, but it won’t be long before you’re drowning in gold or bypassing vendors in search of loot. Despite the amazing depth of Daggerfall’s banking, if you don’t want to entangle yourself with the debt repayment and credit system, you can happily ignore the entire system.
But even if underdeveloped, the streamlined financial systems of these RPGs instill in players a strong sense of worlds that exist beyond the player’s field of vision. Beyond the edges of your screen, there are more characters waiting to offer you their wares, sell you their services, or demand payment of your debts than you’ve ever encountered. Something as grim as a financial calculation can breathe life into the fictional places around you. Especially when almost everything you need to do to facilitate those big, getting-out-of-the-way moments is likely to cost you…something.
It’ll be interesting to see if Starfield uses its banking system in a more purposeful way than previous RPGs. In creating a world that touches the universe by borrowing from the familiar, Bethesda couldn’t possibly document all the aspects of today’s space technology that will chart our path to the stars. But if it’s only focusing on one in particular, I’d like the monetary system to support it. Thousands of star fields will be filled with emotion.