Warning: Spoilers for “Starfield.”
I’m playing Starfield and my wife is leaving me.
Or, at least it felt like she should be. No one throws my hoard of toilet paper to me. None of my other junk was angrily flushed out of the airlock. No one is crying. All she did was stare at me with narrowed eyes, a look of disgust etched on her perfectly proportioned face.
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“It’s more about holding it to Cal,” I told her, giving an answer that seemed somewhat believable. Her expression didn’t change. As we walked around the exchange, it remained unchanged. I cycled through the responses I received, trying to justify why I was giving the Crimson Fleet tons of credit, and, like she’d rehearsed it a thousand times, she shot down every one of them.
Soon, the only options I had left were to embrace nihilism and tell her I was just doing it to make a lot of money, or to just admit that I had no idea what the hell I was doing.
Because those answers, and the meaningless choice that comes with them as to whether or not I want to tell her that I stand by my decision, are the only answers that make sense in a world as bleak as Starfield.
Andrea didn’t leave my side after our small talk was over. When I returned to Constellation HQ and received two similar reprimands from Sarah Morgan and Sam Coe, she was there. She didn’t seem to care and by the end, I had given up trying to explain why I did it.
There wasn’t any option for me to tell them, I just found the pirates trying to act like real people, just more convincing than others I’d met in settled systems. I can’t say that, after seeing how corrupt the United Colonies and Freestar collectives – the in-game Colonies Coca-Cola and Pepsi – are at their core – there doesn’t seem to be any other way to try and counteract their disapproval of the universe than what was just offered to me. A perfect universe. I can’t tell them they don’t have to live in a galaxy without rebels.
I can’t do these things because Starfield, like the real world I’m living in this year, doesn’t seem to be built to care about what real people think or want. It doesn’t listen. Not necessarily because it hates us and enjoys watching us struggle, although it might be comforting to think so, but because it simply doesn’t care whether we live or die.
I never actually felt alone as I wandered through the godless universe, but that’s exactly how I felt. Although I often heard the rhythmic march of my followers to my footsteps and felt the crew’s eyes on me as I slept on the ship, they all felt so distant. They keep telling me how happy they are to be in my orbit every day, but it’s like they’re doing it through words on a screen because they’re sitting a thousand miles away from me.
I know they are sincere and I try to believe them. I do want to, but it’s hard.
In our own little bubbles of isolation, we travel through a world that seems impossibly huge — in a way that re inforces how small and insignificant you actually are rather than inspiring the wonders of the universe — while also being incredibly small. Suffocating. Within this vast coffin sold to us as humanity’s home among the stars, only a handful of densely populated systems actually feel that way. Beyond them are a large number of places that are functionally close to empty lots or ruins of houses that may have once been something but are now simply home to nameless enemies who are allegedly gradually clearing them out. We’re in space, but the astronauts have nothing to say except to tell you to die.
It’s like 90% of the people in the universe are gradually being eliminated. They were sent back to the few remaining places where the lights were still on, or were still wandering among the ruins, desperately trying to find something of value in the abandoned and lost places.
Everywhere you look, you see things that people spent their limited lives building and maintaining over the years, being abandoned for seemingly no reason other than because someone with power said so. If you’ve played the game for more than five minutes, you’ve met one of these people. “I failed because I cared more about exploring the stars than pushing the pencil,” Sarah Morgan said of her eight-year tenure managing the UC Navigation Team. “Because of my lack of foresight, all I ended up with was fragmented divisions and a bunch of excuses.”
The great institutions that ordered the closure of these factories sit happily in their own little fiefdoms, abandoning all war in favor of meaningless gestures. They’re no longer really at war, just desperate to keep their coffers as full as possible, and by convincing these men that a boulder shrouded in their colors is the best way to live in its shadow and swear allegiance Securing the loyalty of a captive audience. .
This particular kind of nationalism feels like the sickening, friendly- sounding marketing miasma emanating from the web woven by various corporations in the spaces controlled by Cal and Freestar. The galaxy is haunted by the specter of pain caused by the end result of their attempts to expand their influence across the interstellar frontier, so now they are left trying to co-opt and consolidate power within the withered husks of remaining civilizations.
While I seem to spend most of my time collecting various items and moving them from one place to another, I do sometimes stumble upon something wonderful and beautiful out there in the darkness beyond. There are breathtaking views and magical wonders out there, waiting to be discovered or rediscovered by those who might find pleasure in them.
I try to focus on these, no matter how big they seem, how small they seem or anything in between. I tried to take comfort in their presence. Think of it as evidence that we’re on the right track. Sometimes it works.
By the end, I felt like I’d turned over nearly every stone and been stared at by every blank face in this vast land. I move toward unity, putting the puzzle pieces together to reveal the essence of the starry universe. Another version of me waits, surrounded by the shimmering, dancing cosmic ornaments of the corridors between worlds. In disturbing mechanical voices, they spoke to me about some of the consequences for my life.
Then I walked into the shiny object at the center of it all. No one went with me. I stood alone in a brave new world that looked almost exactly like the one I had just left.
All I could do was, like the oppressed masses of a settled galaxy, gradually start trying to build something worthwhile again, knowing that it would eventually be abandoned.
I’m playing Starfield and it’s 2023.
