Arthur Parallax – On Starfield "I performed my gaming ritual - a ceremonial removing and burning of the trousers" 🔥👖 #Starfield

Ah, Starfield. Bethesda has taken us across wastelands; the frozen, fantastical north; wowed us with dragons; crazy quests; zany characters, and hundreds of memorable moments for well over two decades, and most recently they offered up an entire universe for exploration…in Starfield.

I was so excited at this premise that I left my wife in preparation, and signed over total custody of our two children, Brian and Flelilda. It may seem extreme to some, but they would doubtless become nought but a distraction as I travelled the far reaches of space, taking me out of my gaming fantasies for such menial reasons as requiring heat, food, and illustrations of love (my third album).

Such piffling quibbles would completely remove me from my immersion in Starfield, and so it was best for all that I move to a single-bed bungalow in rural Scotland, paint all of the windows black and lose myself in Bethesda’s newest creation, a creation that was over a decade in the making!

I tried to stay away from finding out early scores and thoughts – I wanted this experience to be unsullied by others and be mine, and mine alone - but I admit, I did catch wind of the incredible ratings, the 95/100s, and the 10/10s, my engorgement was almost complete.

And so, when I finally sat down to play it – after yanking the phone cord out of the wall and bricking up my front door, so as not to be disturbed, natch – I performed my gaming ritual - a ceremonial removing and burning of the trousers 🔥👖- and sat down in my deep leather couch to lose myself…hopefully for months.

And, well…where to begin? Starfield was a game created at an almost genetic level, seemingly just for me! At the true heart of my gaming are classics such as Boiling Point, Hard Truck Apocalypse, Xenus 2: White Gold, and The Precursors – titles that promise so much, and yet overreach their grasp in bewildering ways, lovely stuff.

From the second that the stiff, uninteresting combat began I was entranced, as I frowningly made my way through unintuitive menus and unfilterable screens of myriad ammo, weapons and rocks, my toes were magazine-racking in anticipation. You can imagine my elation, when the promised open universe was, in fact, just images of planets and solar systems that could only be reached by effectively fast travelling.

I pirouetted around my living room at the joy of coming across endless, menial quests that relied on me standing directly in front of the person who had given me said quest both before and after completion – requiring multiple menu usage and loading screens so that they could deliver a single line of dialogue and physically hand me payment in a world hundreds of years in the future where people seem to have forgotten about telecommunications and bank transfers, there are few things finer in the world than artificially doubling the length of something by having to backtrack at every opportunity.

Just when I thought I’d burst with pride at the choices made throughout development, I discovered that the levelling up system was so incremental as to almost be un-needed, and the requirements to unlock them (jumping up and down fifty times, searching desperately for some sort of random space combat thirty times) oscillated titillatingly between mindless and mind-numbing. Not only this but at one point, the game tells you that you must travel to different planets and search for mysterious alien powers to aid you in your grand, inter-planetary journey. Powers that need to be unlocked through intricate, alien rituals…such as slowly floating through glittering orbs in small, dark rooms, over twenty times.

If that doesn’t float your boat, fear not! For the powers that you unlock will bedazzle and wow you, such as restoring a little bit of oxygen, or moving forward a single step slightly quicker than usual - game-changing stuff. Like me, you may even be so overwhelmed by them that you end up not using them at all for the entire duration of the game. 

Even if you don’t want to pursue the main quest, there are so many other things to get lost in, and nothing sets the tone for the vastness of the universe more than landing in what is described as a massive city that is a bastion of debauchery and base human desire but is actually a single straight street with some shops either side, a street down which you will traipse multiple times telling someone that someone that lives down the road fancies them. Or solving incredibly complex fractured relationships, torn apart for years by suggesting that the people involved simply talk to each other – it’s at moments such as this that the depth of the writing truly shines.

As you traverse this universe, you’ll come across robots and aliens that all feature similar designs, sometimes even just being slightly different sizes or shades of colour across each solar system, it really drives home a sense of wonder. At one point, I landed on a planet that had dozens of towering mechs that lay in ruins, as the denizens of the planet talked of the ‘mech wars’ that took place years before. For a moment, it dawned on me that perhaps, that would have been a far more exciting time to play through than the current one, where I’m just walking around yet another desolated planet looking at hunks of metal with nothing to do, surely climbing into a mech and getting involved in weighty, pitched battles would be full of excitement and a sense of scale? But nah, that’s just me being silly, I suppose. Much more fun to pick three insects off a human-sized robot and then hand him a small battery instead.

At one point I was treated to a cheeky glitch that saw one of my companions becoming permanently attached to me, and I found myself in a situation whereby I couldn’t leave their company, nor complete the mission that would allow the questline to be over, and me free to choose another companion’s personal mission, so that was nice.

Luckily, the dialogue between characters is so rich with nuance, and so engaging that you’ll never tire of them as you decide to go off the beaten path and come across myriad duplicate buildings, mines and landscapes across dozens of planets that feature little to no environmental storytelling, it’s clearly a design choice that allows the player time to reflect. And reflect you will, as you move hundreds of objects from your inventory to your companions and your ships, rotating them seemingly endlessly as you utilise the crafting systems which aren’t so much a step back from the Fallout series, so much an expensive Uber journey in the opposing direction, and of course, there’s no way to filter anything whilst doing so.

All in all, Starfield does the impressive job of spreading itself so thinly that it achieves nothing – but sucks up your time, as any truly great game should. Every aspect of the game is uninspired and flat, from the combat through to the character /alien / robot designs, trite dialogue, re-used architecture and eye-crossing bland, endless missions.

It even manages to achieve the sensation of the old arcade racers, where the car stays still and the environment moves, when in space. You’ll never be able to reach anything that you can see without fast-travelling or loading screens or multiple menus – so traversal when in your spacecraft feels like selecting chapters on an old DVD, beautiful. Starfield is also an incredibly inspiring game, it inspired one of my close friends to stop playing it, and instead replay Mass Effect 2, which was – and apologies for the deeply technical terminology here – ‘better’. Better in almost every aspect, in fact, especially emotional engagement, resource/inventory management and character development. 

SUMMARY

I’m still playing Starfield after almost forty hours, some may say that I’m doing this because it just about captivates me enough to plod on due to my inherent love of the RPG genre, and the innate need to see at least the main questline to completion (a questline that has plot reveals that wouldn’t be out of place in a mid-‘90s erotic thriller starring Shannon Whirry) so I don’t entirely feel that I’ve wasted my time with it, but those people aren’t me, and they’ll never understand my internal machinations.

Anyway – What a game. Right, I’m off to trudge around an empty, grey planet scanning rocks because I’ve hit another grindpoint.

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