I’m kind of obsessed with Starfield’s pending launch. I’ve been counting down the days, mentally dividing them all into hours for a ‘clearer picture’, and even doing that kid thing where I calculate how many more ‘sleeps’ I have before I can boot up Bethesda’s upcoming open-world sci-fi RPG for the first time. I can’t wait to suck at it.
Starfield’s space setting appeals to me, and I’ve always jived with Bethesda's house style of open-world gaming. I’ve got around 300 hours in Morrowind, 400 in Oblivion, a solid twice that in Skyrim, and maybe 500 more between Fallout 3 and 4. I’ve watched every episode of every Star Trek series at least once, and I’m the only person I know who’s excited for Babylon 5’s upcoming animated feature film. So yeah, intersection of interests and all that. It’s a dream come true.
But let’s examine my characters in each of those aforementioned timesinks. Actually, let’s not. We don’t need to look at each one in turn; I can tell you right now, they’re all modeled after the same archetype. My avatars are always good people who face insurmountable odds because they believe in a brighter tomorrow. They’re always human, because there is nothing more inspirational to me than humanity triumphing over adversity. (Yes, even the Nerevarine is reborn as a homo sapien in my little canon. My condolences, sweet Nerevar.)
This runs deeper than Bethesda. In my mind, Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard is forever an altruistic diplomat with a heart of gold. Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Inquisitor is perpetually an inquisitive (ha) figure who strives to learn from history to forge a wise path for Thedas and beyond. Hell, my Pokemon trainers, the courageous young kids they are, make it their mission to defeat the villainous teams as soon as they meet them, not because they’re rudely blocked from becoming Pokemon League Champion otherwise, but because it’s simply the right thing to do.
Hopefully, you see where I’m going here. Starfield, like Mass Effect, is about to give me a charming chance to role-play in a universe with more than a bit of Star Trek DNA in it. What do (most) Star Trek captains value? Everything I just word-vomited about boldness, benevolence, charity, yadda-yadda.
In Starfield, there are multiple major factions, including the order-obsessed utopians of the United Colonies. I could list the rest, but why bother? We know where I’ll be. In Starfield, you’re forced by the main questline to team up with Constellation, a group of starry-eyed explorers, but you can mosey on elsewhere and ignore it just as easily as you can choose not to care about Alduin and the civil war in Skyrim. Except I will totally care, because my character will be just as starry-eyed. In Starfield, you can shoot your way through plenty of obstacles; conversely, you can try to talk things out whenever possible. I’ll be chatty.
I am going to suck at Starfield. It’s a sandbox that invites players to forge their own story, but my story is probably going to sync almost flawlessly with Bethesda’s vanilla canon. It’s a sprawling collection of star systems that looks set to offer the sort of freedom few games can rival, but I’m going to stick to the straight-and-narrow, except when I’m answering unexpected calls for good people to do good things.
Starfield’s got what looks like the greatest potential for morally ambiguous role-playing that Bethesda’s cranked out in ages. I could be Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly, or Georgiou from Star Trek: Discovery - and who doesn’t want to be Michelle Yeoh? - but you might as well slap a uniform on me and call me Captain Picard. Why am I like this? Why am I attracted to the idea of freedom, yet shackled so thoroughly to precisely the kind of ‘boring, forced, goody two-shoes shtick’ that plagues so many other video games? Am I, in truth, a boring human being?
All I can say in my defense is this: there’s a thrill, somehow, in the ability to choose to be a saint. To choose to be this bland. I chose to press a specific button in order to talk the Quarians and Geth down from their war in Mass Effect 3, and I’ll press that button again if Starfield hooks me up with a similar moment. It’s through the freedom to press one button over another that I get what I want out of these games.
Whatever the case may be, I’ll probably enjoy my time navigating the final frontier for years to come, but for all our sakes, I’ll refrain from streaming my progress. Nobody wants to watch someone suck this badly at Starfield.