Other than featuring a premise that seems relatively grounded, Bethesda has been rather secretive about its expansive project. It is known that players start as a highly customizable protagonist who sets off an interstellar journey with various factions involved. Artistically, some have questioned the filmic atmosphere in Starfield’s gameplay demo as something that might deflate the allure of the game, while others see a heavy tone that distinguishes the game from its sci-fi contemporaries.
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Starfield’s Spacefaring Societies
Players can expect to start their Starfield playthrough from humble beginnings, being invited into a group of space explorers after finding a strange relic that demands further investigation. An artifact of unknown origin is also a concept rooted in hard sci-fi works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, meaning that the plot device possibly links to metaphysical topics that humanity has yet to confront within its reality. The fact that these colonies are being portrayed without the utopian wisdom of other fictional civilizations shows that restraint might be Bethesda’s strength in surprising players.
The NASA-Punk art direction of Starfield, as it is described by developers, leans into futurist designs grounded in reality that guess at the trajectory of aerospace technology. This used-future look has the potential to make Starfield’s fiction more believable, illustrating a clear progression from modern-day multistage rockets to the title’s modular starship designs. In terms of exploration, an early-game location like the moon Kreet suggests a tenuous ecosystem that lacks the conventional beauty of Earth’s biosphere. The faded ambiance of frontier worlds could move the mood toward existential topics such as the fragility of advanced life in a galaxy of unfathomable size.
Desolation and Discovery in Starfield
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin once described the Moon’s landscape as “magnificent desolation,” and it is this chilling realization of mortality that might make other planets in Starfield feel alien. The rarity of sustained life would be an organic element in a hard sci-fi story that also complements pacing. It could act as a visible, realistic point of contrast between inhospitable and inhabited planets during gameplay. The overview effect, a transcendental experience that astronauts have reported upon seeing the Earth from space, would be another powerful theme that Bethesda should import into a philosophical narrative that probes the implications behind humans’ curiosity in the universe.
Lifeless worlds may provide the basis for players collecting resources or establishing colonies in Starfield, but there is still uncertainty about where Bethesda is distributing its most meaningful content in-game. If the presence of life, or lack thereof, is handled in a way that rewards players’ efforts, then players may come to appreciate those encounters as well as the emotional weight of the journeys leading up to each discovery. An understated color palette should be an intentional choice if anything, as the balance between life and death was also visually reflected through Fallout 3’s shades of green.
Not unlike the surface of barren planets, the wasteland of Fallout separates its settlements with the remnants of a much older world. A probable difference in this analogy is that the void of space, and any dead star systems, would ideally function as the optional, lonely break between active locations in the questline. Nevertheless, Bethesda could be using these thematic benchmarks to treat its setting with a solemn tranquility that is truly representative of the universe’s spectrum of possibilities. Starfield has to succeed in scale if it aims to capture the nuances of space exploration, having vibrant worlds that color an otherwise ghostly backdrop reveling in its undiscovered wonders.
Starfield releases in 2023 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
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