In the grand tradition of playing the latest Obsidian game and thinking about how Bethesda would have done it worse, or better, The Outer Worlds 2 has got me thinking a lot about its same-publisher cousin Starfield which, for reasons, has left a lot to be desired.
For some of us it wasn't Bethesda enough, for others it exemplifies all the long-standing issues that Bethesda games, even the good ones, have. The mod scene is in crisis, sustained by paid creation club DLC that is a very mixed bag even if you stick to verified creators. The first big expansion, Shattered Space, was frankly a bit cack. And while we're on the subject, where's the second expansion that some of us have already paid for (ahem)? Will anyone care by the time it does show up, given that no end of add-ons can really address the fundamental problem Starfield has: that huge swathes of it are really, mind-numbingly tedious?
Former Bethesda game designer Bruce Nesmith recently admitted that Starfield isn't as good as the studio's other universes of Elder Scrolls and Fallout, lamenting the game's over-reliance on procedurally generated content and also (rather more contentiously) that space is “inherently boring”. The thing is, he's not wrong about that. We even call it space. Because that's all it is. For trillions and trillions of miles.
You might think it's a long way to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen! Genuinely, that is the defining problem for every game designer who has ever tackled space realistically, the vastness thereof. How do you fill the unfillable? How do you make space exploration fun? How do you make space travel compelling? There is no ‘correct' approach, but the space adventure games often make it work in the same way that their counterparts in film and television do: by reducing space travel itself to an inconvenience along the lines of intercity bus travel, and by filling every planet with more or less the same stuff (“procedurally generated” content, the forests near Vancouver, whatever they could find in the Paramount backlot, take your pick).Space games have to make fundamental choices at the design stage about how much Space Stuff they actually want to do. No Man's Sky, for instance, goes all-in on procedural generation for better or worse: boasting a potential eighteen-quintillion planets getting spat out of its algorithmic guts. So that's some realistically vast space, with realistically wide distances between realistically huge planets. But those planets don't orbit their suns, they don't have seasons. NMS doesn't have any realistic systems that govern the position of its celestial bodies, or the flow of trade across its civilisations, like Elite Dangerous attempts to do.
I can hear the scoffs of disdain already, but No Man's Sky is not really a space sim as much as it's a crafting and inventory management game with immaculate scifi vibes. Its planets are gigantic store cupboards full of crafting resources, not places to spend any meaningful time visiting. It's arguably the opposite of a space sim: a stuff sim. Interplanetary travel in No Man's Sky is an elaborate loading screen, achieved with lots of smoke and mirrors that are pretty obvious once you notice them. To be clear, this is not a diss: trickery is how video games achieve basically anything complicated. It's an entire art form that relies on the same basic misdirection as pretending to steal a toddler's nose.
Ever since the seminal Elite on 8-bit computers about four-thousand years ago, the space sim has always been a yardstick of video gaming's highest ambitions, and hardest limitations. In the early days, the most desired and least achievable feature of the genre was the ability to get off the damn ship. Paradoxically this is always what I wished I could do in 1993's Frontier: Elite 2 from David Braben. For me, a foundational achievement in open-world gaming which influenced my love of Elder Scrollses and Grand Theft Autos for decades after. Even now it remains a ludicrously impressive piece of galactic simulation – allowing you to live another life in a speculative scifi future as a jobbing sort of contractor, explorer, mercenary, bounty hunter, pirate, drug smuggler, petty criminal, chartered passenger shuttle, whatever you want, in a vast hyper-detailed simulation of the milky way galaxy where you could actually land on planets – which was mind-blowing at the time – and it wasn't achieved with a convenient cutscene or a fade to white as you hit cloud cover.
You could fly into a planet's atmosphere, jet around like an aeroplane, land, take off again, and speed off toward another entire planet that's millions of miles away, completely seamlessly, never once breaking out of that simulation – this still remains a vanishingly rare feature in the space genre over thirty years later. But Frontier wouldn't let you park up and go to Space McDonald's, like you can in Starfield. Which is, I think, where Starfield actually shines. By leveraging that Bethesda magic, that unique sense of inhabiting a lived-in world where people drink tea and chat about the weather, Starfield brings a human factor to the space sim that's usually jarringly absent from the genre. It says a lot that the worst bits of Starfield, the bits everyone hates, are the vast stretches of real estate populated by procedural generation: or, in other words, the parts where the human factor is least involved.
Convincingly sending a player to space in a video game is conceptually about as difficult as actually flying someone up there. In both cases there's copious amounts of energy and weird maths involved, and the nagging question of whether it's even worth the trouble. Games like the Mass Effect trilogy and the Outer Worlds saga feature no direct space flight at all, but fling players into intriguing worlds of combat, politics, archaeology, and espionage, in much the same way as their fantasy counterparts do but with blinking control panels and alien landscapes as a backdrop instead of, I dunno, castles and rivers full of discarded excrement. And they're all the better for it, because instead of trying to answer questions like “how do we convincingly portray astronomical distances”, they're asking more pertinent questions like “do you want to pump the blue enby science princess?” and “which crew member should you leave to die, the boring migraine guy or the space racist?”.Of course, I'm not saying that space flight, space exploration, dicking around on planets etc shouldn't ever be attempted, I guess I'm saying that a Starfield sequel (if one ever happens, presumably in the late 2070s) should be more stringent about its priorities. Push the Todd Howard sliders up and pull the David Braben sliders back down. And I'm not being facetious here: every studio that's tackled the space sim has started with the same basic ingredients and fiddled about with the sliders to get to their particular vision, that is always compromised in some way because you can't just Do Everything in a video game. Studios have got a finite amount of time and resources and have to decide where best to deploy them, with every fork taken limiting the options as development trundles on.
What questions do you ask when you start making a space sim, then? Are we going to focus on combat or exploration? If we focus on exploration, are we talking about a wilderness of spacebound curiosities or are we making planetfall? If we're landing on planets, what's the ratio of lonely sunsets on barren rocks vs bustling cities and interstellar civilisation? Can we land anywhere on a planet, or only in hand-designed, predetermined areas? Does this have multiplayer? What do we do about Earth? Do we just not have Earth, do we contrive some in-universe reason why we can't go there? Do we try and actually depict Earth somehow with all of its buildings and people and different types of tree and individual portions of marmalade in complimentary hotel breakfasts?Space games have got to pick a lane. That's why No Man's Sky is a crafting and inventory management game with a scifi backdrop, rather than an actual space sim with newtonian flight physics and orbital modelling. That's why Elite Dangerous is Interstellar Truck Simulator with a bit of dogfighting. That's why The Outer Worlds has nothing whatsoever to do with flying spaceships outside of cutscenes.
But it often feels like with Starfield, Bethesda didn't really pick a lane, they tried to do everything. And let's be clear, it's a noble effort: if you stick to the authored stuff, the main story and faction quests, the side content that isn't obviously being spat out of an objective generator, it's good! At its best it's Skyrim in Space, which is what we all wanted, right? And it has that exquisite level of microdetail that makes Bethesda games so compelling. The mundane stuff that just makes the world come together. You can fling a sandwich down a hallway or steal a parsnip. Eat at Dennys, wear a hat, whatever you want. Not to mention the ship builder, which is just an incredible standout feature that everyone loves for good reason.But Starfield also wants to do Elite's gig economy and space dogfighting, neither of which it does particularly well. It has a smattering of the No Man's Sky stuff: procedurally generated planet surfaces, land anywhere, gather resources with a mining laser, build bases, marvel at the local fauna and flora… but it rarely gives you a compelling reason to actually engage with any of those systems, they're just kinda there.Every time you land on a planet, the game generates this massive square cell with about five points of interest that are more or less the same five points of interest you get wherever else you land on any other planet in the game. And the distance between those points of disinterest is comically large, to the point where the most requested quality of life update to the game in the early days was, essentially, a mako. A space car. A thing that everyone hated in Mass Effect but became blessed relief here because it cut out so much of Starfield's tedium.
Starfield knows that it is boring. That's why the bulk of its traversal is actually just the fast travel system. For all the time that's been spent on letting you fly the ship, you rarely actually have to do it. Which flies in the face of Todd Howard's grand vision of a NASA-inspired space sim that we'd find compelling because of the tactile equipment and the wonder of staring at edge-lit planets from orbit and thinking about Carl Sagan's pale blue dot monologue because as ever he's trying to relive his mid-20th century American youth via the power of Gamebryo.The point is that there's so much in Starfield that's completely worthless. From its core ideas to its vast empty spaces. Hundreds of thousands of barren planet cells that amount to little more than real estate for mods and Creation Club content. 1000 empty worlds ready to be filled with player homes and starbases and custom quests. There are premium add-ons that add everything from dungeons and crash sites to full on faction quests, companions, and DLC sized expansions. There could be a lot more, but the modding community abandoned Starfield in droves after the base game turned out to be such a damp squib.And it pains me to acknowledge Starfield's myriad flaws because I still think Bethesda doing a space game is exactly what I want from this entire hobby, despite this hobbled first attempt. At the risk of sounding like EDGE magazine in the 90s, I want to get out of the ship and talk to people. I want to go to a shop and buy a snazzy outfit. I wanna read people's emails and steal their stuff. I wanna break into cabins and rifle through suitcases on an enormous interstellar cruise ship full of rich arseholes (that mission was cool, by the way. Starfield has cool missions!).
I know that the Outer Worlds games and Starfield actually have very little in common beyond some superficial similarities, and an obviously intertwined lineage. They are, and should be, utterly distinct. But there's one thing I want Starfield 2 to take from Outer Worlds and it's this: confine the whole thing to one solar system. Or a handful of solar systems. Cut all that empty space down to a few planets worth. You don't need hundreds of worlds to keep things interesting: solar systems are infinitely diverse places. The one we live in has everything from subterranean oceans of ice moons to the peaks of Martian mountains. Storms of liquid methane. Cascading tectonic sheets of molten metal. Shops called Boots that sell deodorant, sandwiches, chewing gum and umbrellas, but not actual boots. You don't need 1000 planets to compel a player to explore. You just need something worth exploring. That's why Hello Games are obviously betting that the No Man's Sky concept works just as well on a single planet as it does on a quintillion, with their upcoming Light No Fire (which, I have to say, looks way more interesting than No Man's Sky ever was).
And you might think that the idea of a Starfield sequel being a thousand times smaller than the original is a ludicrous proposition, but Bethesda themselves have learned this lesson before. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall boasted a procedurally generated world twice the size of the island of Great Britain, but there was nothing there more compelling than Swindon on a Tuesday afternoon. The game was enormous, and therefore boring. And you could tug on the realism argument here and say, well, life in a quasi-medieval fantasy world probably would be kind of a slog. Horses aren't very fast, everyone has diphtheria. Or, you could go back to the drawing board and make Morrowind. A sequel to Daggerfall that was a decimal point of a percentage of the size of its immediate forebear, but a billion times more interesting. Because rather than being filled in by an unintelligent computer program making Lego towns, everything in Morrowind was hand placed and hand crafted by real people with hands. Which is handy.Whether it's procedural generation, machine learning, or large language models, whatever increasingly sophisticated form it takes, computers can fill endless blank spaces with ever decreasing levels of human intervention required. But as we know from decades of video game history, none of it is worth a second look without the human factor. If you take that away you've got endless amounts of absolutely nothing. And given that Starfield's biggest triumph is that it brings humanity to the fore in a genre that often sidelines it, it not only makes sense but it's imperative on Starfield 2 to narrow its scope and double down on the human factor.If they actually ever make a sequel. On Bethesda's timeline it probably won't happen until we're all dead. But generally speaking, chasing the dream of a realistically vast space sim is folly. If you do it well, you've made a whole lot of nothing. If you do it badly, you've made Starfield. It seems like sacrilege to say as someone who literally grew up playing Elite and admiring the vision of David Braben, but the best space games are the ones that focus on characters and stories. Where the vastness of the galaxy is implied in glimpses and stage backdrops, and not actually given the spotlight.
Don't show me distant worlds. Tell me stories about them.
