The unveiling of starfieldthe jewel in the crown of Xbox Game Studios’ 12-month release calendar, faltered a bit during this weekend’s Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase. Many criticism to have noted that his cast of characters looks like the same dead eyes that came with it The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Some remain unimpressed by its base building and resource gathering, things that other games have done much better than failure 4. Still others have gently warned that dialing in starship combat is both an art and a science, as evidenced by the Star Citizen projects. manymany revisions so far.
I tend to agree on all points. Bethesda might be exaggerating a bit this time. But what do you expect from your first new IP in more than 20 years? More bullet points rarely add up to more quality though, and I too wonder if 1,000 planets simply means 1,000 places to get lost and bored. But there’s one part of Sunday’s presentation that really touched me: The narrative that ties into the game’s main quest line seems bold, if not downright inspiring.
When I record what Todd Howard and company lay down starfield is both an ambitious single-player video game and a commentary on the state of modern space exploration. Our society seems to have lost a little of its sense of wonder since the Space Shuttle was retired, and starfield could be a kind of balm for our jaded view of life, the universe and everything around us.
The trailer begins with a quote from Anatole France, a French journalist, novelist and poet. his Epicurean Garden (The Garden of Epicurus) begins with a few paragraphs that set the tone for the reflections that follow, all of which carefully relate to what we now consider to be fairly modern scientific concepts – the speed of light, the spectral analysis of distant stars, and the scale and vastness of the universe itself. The English translation, which Alfred Allinson managed here, feels like it could easily have been the inspiration for the ending of men in black
Here’s a bit more of that full quote:
Nor is there anything absurd to suppose that centuries of thought and intelligence could live and die within a minute within the confines of an atom of matter before us. Things in themselves are neither big nor small, and when we say the universe is vast we are speaking purely from a human point of view. If it were suddenly reduced to the dimensions of a hazelnut and all things kept their relative proportions, we would not know of the change. Locked in the nut with us, the North Star would still take fifty years to transmit its light to us. And the earth, though smaller than an atom, would be shed with tears and blood just as copiously as it is today. The miracle is that the star field is not so big, but that man measured it.
I’m not reading this as haughty or haughty. I read it as sarcasm. If the universe is as big as described above, humans still have to grok a tiny fraction of it. There is much more to discover than what we have yet seen with our eyes or our most fabulous telescopes and X-ray instruments. France, it seems, was mostly a skeptic. His quote can be summed up fairly simply in today’s language: Mankind hasn’t seen anything, but we still pretend we know everything anyway.
I think that’s one of the unspoken design goals of starfield is to bring us all together.
Take the factions presented so far in 15 minutes starfield Presentation. There’s the Crimson Fleet, a gang of criminals who don’t obey the rules of UCSEC, which oversees the Settled Systems. Hard-working “Dustys” go about their daily work and mine resources on the fringes of civilized space. Capitalism does what capitalism does, which is the exploitation of humanity and its resources for profit. In the meantime, only the Constellation – a walnut-lined league of inquisitive gentlemen – remain the last true explorers.
The big players in starfield all sound a lot like today’s big players. As Elon Musk hopes to monetize low Earth orbit and beyond, the United States Space Force and other major global powers can’t wait to ship the first batch of weapons and bombs to the moon and plant a flag on Mars . Meanwhile, a trillion trillion worlds beyond the edges of the Milky Way still cry out for exploration. Hell, it was only last month that we got the first one Semi-clear view of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. While everyone argues about how much of the hazelnut they can choke on, the rest of the trees and forests and unimaginable biomes beyond remain invisible.
Here’s the catch: As far as video games go, gamers of all persuasions have been there and back, to the edge of our own galaxy and beyond. play in my time elite dangerous, for example, I have traveled more than 150,000 light-years and visited nearly 3,000 star systems, personally discovering hundreds of new worlds. All I needed was three weeks of game time. The same goes for fans of Nobody’s heaven, a game also teeming with complex virtual life. But both games are largely randomly generated. It’s all just unconnected background fluff. So the next step for gaming types isn’t about pixels or frame rates. It’s about turning that fluff into something more substantial and telling a story that can really inspire wonder.
There are a few tidbits from Sunday’s trailer that I think were overlooked – things that tell me Bethesda is going in the right direction.
While the lockpicking mini-game had my eyes rolling out and my stomach churning when a highly armored astronaut started throwing grenades at an exoplanet, I gasped when I realized that players are free to choose their own religion in the game be able.
Raised Enlightened, an optional trait, is available to those who “grew up as a member of the Enlightened Ones.” Raised Universal, on the other hand, notes that your character “grew up as a member of the Sanctum universe.” Meanwhile, pan-galactic pagans seem to prefer the serpent’s embrace, as they all “grew up worshiping the Great Serpent.” How these sub-factions and beliefs influence existing religious and political beliefs will provide excellent fodder for both critics and players, but they can also provide a foundation upon which our individual human souls can gain a foothold in the game. With any luck, this RPG base might even cause some players to change their perspective.
Howard said you can “be whoever you want and go where you want”. Perhaps traveling also means in a spiritual sense. “The biggest question of all,” said one of the characters in the trailer, is “what’s out there.” But what you think is out there has a lot to do with what you see inside yourself. “Whatever lies at the end of this path will change humanity forever,” said the same character. It might also change some hearts and minds about the space program.
Or it will fail miserably. The story will be garbage, its esoteric conclusions vented into an indifferent atmosphere of jaded, miserable earthlings. That’s the real risk as I see it – not the quality of base building and not the depth of weapon crafting. Will the game touch my soul? That’s something I haven’t wondered about my GameStop pre-order in a long time.