Starfield-Fallout 4 in Space
Since this is as Bethesda Game, well, it looks a lot like Fallout 4. It’s a lot prettier. The artwork looks amazing. I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about the frame rates, but I’ve never been that kind of geek. My games either work or they crash, frame rates aren’t that important to me.
In Fallout 4 the first companion you met is Codsworth, a very friendly and overly cute fellow with brilliant voice acting that gives him a lot personality. In the new footage from Starfield we appear to have a robot companion who is cut from a different cloth than Codsworth. He is a lumbering, knuckle dragging clunker of a machine that speaks with a sterile mechanical voice. Clearly he is meant to be less of a companion and more of an online help system as his main job appears to be pointing out the bleeding obvious. Of course, it’s impossible to tell at this point, he may turn out to be the best companion in Bethesda history, but I would be greatly surprised if that turns out to be the case.
It’s Not An Adventure Game if You Don’t Collect Everything Not Nailed Down.
Near the start of the gameplay trailer our hero stops and mines a bit of iron. He passed up the chance to scrap a bit of Rust Root, whatever that may be. In most games looting and collecting are an integral part of the game. You need resources to build things and you need money to buy things. Building and buying are important. Or they can be. In Fallout 4 you learn soon enough that you can farm resources and never have to worry about money again. In Starfield, you’ll be able to build bases and ships. Later in the video we see that you can craft weapons and likely clothing.
I was not a fan of the Settlement System in Fallout 4. I hated that the settlers were all idiots who couldn’t dig a well or find a bed to sleep in. In Starfield, it looks like the members of your team will be a bit smarter. You can hire people to work on your bases and crew your ships. That’s likely a step up from everyone whining about how dirty their fingernails are.
Kill Them. Kill Them All!
One of the more annoying aspects of Fallout 4 is the idle chatter you find throughout the game. Sure it’s fun the first time a Super Mutant asks Is Somebody There? but it’s a bit less fun the four hundredth time you hear it. There’s a little bit of battle in the trailer where you kill off a few pirates. Right off the bat we get a bit of chatter from them. You’re gonna pay for that. Fall back. You’re mine. Open fire. These are lines that could have come out of the mouth of any random Raider in Fallout 4. But maybe we won’t be doing as much battle here and the combat dialogue won’t matter that much.
There’s also space combat, where you can control your ship in aerial dogfights with whoever the bad guys are. The space combat looks a little clunky, but again, I’m guessing you can do as little or as much of that as you want to.
There are also Factions, and it looks like a couple of good guys and a couple of maybe not so good guys. Building alliances can have profound effects on how games play out, so I’m guessing there are good endings and bad endings depending on who you decide to team up with.
The Big Quest and The Freedom to Explore
Now, if I hadn’t just finished watching Halo the TV Show not too long ago, this whole idea of searching for a magical artifact that gives you visions might have been a bit more interesting. As it is, it looks like a giant fetch quest. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just seems less the center of a game twenty years in the making and more like, oh, really? That’s it? I loved an odd little game called Spore where you started off as a microscopic life form and ended up meeting god. The whole Search for the Ancients thing is fine, but it has been done, like, a lot.
On the other hand, the odds are good you can ignore the main quest and just spend all your time exploring. There are over a thousand worlds. At first this is exciting news, but the first planet they show is an icy moon only suitable for mining. That system also has a Saturn like ringed planet, which would not be a good candidate for landing on since it looks like a giant ball of gases. But even if there are a literal thousand worlds to explore, what does that mean?
Fallout 4 had around 400 locations you could visit. The map is huge and the Commonwealth only has three real cities, Diamond City, The Institute, and Goodneighbor. You can add Far Harbor and Nuka World if you like, but still not too much on the civilization front. So, what are the odds that any of these worlds have 400 locations? Or, since the Commonwealth is just a small corner of North America, what are the odds of any world having thousands, or millions, of locations? I’m pretty sure Starfield isn’t going to be The Oasis.
Yes, I’ll Play Starfield
Right, I mean, none of my complaints are deal breakers for me. Starfield is the only game in the XBOX/Bethesda Showcase that looked even remotely interesting to me. A lot of them were pretty, but they just aren’t my kind of games. So maybe Starfield will be the last game I care about. You know, until twenty years from now when Fallout 5 comes out.
