Starfield: The Looking Glass

This will probably be my last Starfield entry here until modding tools become available, so if you're already tired of hearing about it, bear with me one last time and then we'll get back to taking down raiders in the Commonwealth.

Yesterday I finished Starfield's main quest and I've been thinking since about what exactly to say about it. Not regarding spoilers - I'm not going to spoil the ending here for you - but about Starfield in general and the place it has in video games and the Bethesda canon.

I've been playing Bethesda RPGs a long time now. I started with Fallout 3 in 2010, went back to try out Oblivion, moved on to New Vegas, and then hopped over to Skyrim for a while. I then landed in Fallout 4 and made a home there. (I skipped Fallout 76 altogether.) And I've been telling people since Starfield launched that the one thing that they cannot do is think of it as a reskinned Fallout 4. Starfield's obviously a different beast, and you have to treat it that way.

And then I made the mistake of thinking of it like Fallout 4.

There are certain games that didn't just move the ball down the field, but they actually moved the field around. Half Life. Deus Ex. Portal. Grand Theft Auto 3. Bioshock. Where nearly all other games were content to repackage the current state of the art and call it new, the designers of these games all chose to strike out at oblique angles to extend the technical and narrative scopes of the medium itself. And sometimes it took a while for people to realize they did it.

People always conceptualize the new in terms of how it matches the old. It takes a difficult eye to see something purely for what it is, and not for what you are already familiar with.

Now that I see what exactly Bethesda attempted here, and how well they managed to achieve it, I think one day people are going to look back at Starfield as a field-moving title. Not for the technology - the coding bits are all incremental advances - but for the risks Bethesda took here with the game narrative. 

Some aspects are as subtle as a sledgehammer: there's still the obligatory dramatic action pieces at the end, the tests of skill and equipment, a final confrontation between hero and nemesis. And for some people, that's all they will ever see. But there are subtleties, things that Bethesda is trying to get you to listen to, and they know that you probably won't hear it the first time. And that's fine, they're patient and will wait until you're in a place to hear it again.

Underlying all of Starfield's story is a common theme: "Is my perspective the only real one?"

In short: do I really have the right to be a hero? Do I have the right to make world-altering decisions for others? What gives me the right? And what if I am wrong?

Fallout 4's answer to that question was simple: "Hell yes, I'm the hero!" Every story, every significant character, every faction hinged on the player's decisions to either save or condemn everybody. There was no real question. You're the hero - go get to work. And it made the entire game a somewhat narcissistic action playground, where what you did was always right because you were the hero and that made it right.

Starfield takes that completely apart and puts it together again into something new.

I owe Bethesda an apology. I probably owe you guys one, too. Starfield is a far better game than I gave it credit for - just not necessarily on the level of presumed familiarity that veterans of Fallout or Skyrim (or No Man's Sky, for that matter) would have expected. Bethesda took real risks here and created a milestone title for their own canon and gaming history in general.

It's worth the purchase and the playthrough. But more than that, it's worth the examination and reflection. Take your time with it. Poke into the details. Don't rush the quests; don't reduce it all in your mind into the shapes of things that went on before. Listen to what the writers are trying to tell you and listen until you hear it.

Work to see Starfield for what it is: something new.

It's not something you'll see at first. And that's entirely the point.