Xbox revealed an impressive slew of games at its not-E3 showcase this weekend, understandably spending the longest on Starfield, which it hopes will be a new jewel wrought into its bright green crown after a long period in the shadow of Sony’s superior PlayStation lineup. After the flop that was Redfall earlier this year, Microsoft needs to get its exclusives back on track, and Mr. Spencer has put all his eggs in this space basket. Xbox is betting on a huge launch, but it seems to have taken inspiration from a game with a disastrous one: No Man's Sky.
The hour-long showcase of the space RPG’s systems was exhaustive, giving fans an incredibly close look at a game that has been shrouded in mystery thus far. There was a lot to like. The character creator has incredible depth, and the skill system with its myriad upgrades and themed challenges to increase your aptitude for lockpicking, jetpacking, or anything in between looks like a great iteration on the roleplaying elements that make Bethesda games, well, Bethesda games.
As well as designing your character, their background, and those choices possibly having a Dragon Age: Origins-style effect on your opening (yes please), there is an intricate ship-building functionality. Whether you make a platypus, Optimus, or anything elseus, the scale and awe-striking size of these spacefaring gargantuans is impressive on every level. While modular vehicles are new to Bethesda, it basically falls under character creation, as your ship is an extension of yourself as you pillage the solar systems of Starfield. What, you can be a good guy too? Maybe next time.
It’s all very Bethesda, it all feels like the sort of thing that might be in The Elder Scrolls 6, despite this being a new IP. However, there’s plenty of stuff that feels a little out of place, and a lot more No Man’s Sky.
Take the resources, for example. You can mine resources on any planet you visit, even tracking planetary data to decide whether you want to make planetfall or not depending on its properties. Once there, you can deploy mining lasers and get all your nickel ore and whatever else the planet holds to presumably build more stuff with. I don’t mean to be overly harsh, but these elements look like a reskinned No Man’s Sky, removing Hello Games’ iconic vibrancy in place of gritty realism. It’s no coincidence that these parts of the trailer had an overbearing HUD, ruining all that gorgeous scenery that looks so great with the game’s otherwise sparse overlays.
Maybe it becomes better when you build a base and start to automate the drilling. However, not everyone is interested in becoming a space colonist, landing on worlds to tear them asunder, harvesting any possible wealth before leaving robots to continue doing the same thing, undoubtedly stripping the planet of its natural resources, upsetting the carefully-balanced ecology, and ruining things for the native species. Even for those players who want to do that (you can do anything, after all), base building has hardly been Bethesda’s strong point in the past.
Fallout 4’s settlements were a blight upon an otherwise okay-ish RPG. While there’s plenty I don’t like in Bethesda Game Studios’ most recent RPG (no, 76, TES: Blades, or one hundred new editions of Skyrim don’t count), the base building was by far the worst element. Finding scrap, making scrap, and searching far and wide for desk fans so you could get vital gears all bogged down what could have been the best Fallout game yet. Turning that scrap into walls and beds and turrets and god knows what else was utterly dull, and while I prefer an ‘80s-NASA science-fiction aesthetic to the post-apocalypse, I’m not looking forward to this aspect of Starfield.
This leads to more questions, though. The ore mining system is ripped straight from No Man’s Sky, so is Starfield a similar survival game? The enhanced skill tree suggests otherwise, that Bethesda is sticking with the RPG elements we know and love. Does Starfield have a case of analysis paralysis here? Does it not know what game it wants to be? I worry that the mining and base building has been tacked on as filler, as more ‘stuff’ to do to artificially inflate the game’s already eye-watering runtime. I don’t want to build a thousand bases on a thousand planets, I just want to perform space hijacks on ships that come too close, boarding with my party of raiders to shed blood and loot holds for their sandwiches. Please don’t indenture me into a lifetime in a mining colony just to progress my piratical dreams.