Starfield is Bethesda’s latest upcoming open world extravaganza, set to deliver another of the vast, sprawling, densely populated, incident-packed maps that the developer has become famous for. The recently announced game represents the developer’s first new IP for over 25 years, and promises to be a major rival for Bethesda’s other major franchises, Fallout and The Elder Scrolls.
However, if Starfield really wants to differentiate itself from other recent Bethesda titles, it needs to avoid something else the developer has become renowned for in a less positive sense. Skyrim notoriously allowed players to pursue every single possible build in a single playthrough, maxing out their stats and simultaneously becoming a master wizard, warrior, and thief all at once. The upcoming action-RPG should force players to choose a build and stick with it, tailoring the gameplay experience to match whichever character archetype the player has selected. This approach would greatly increase the game’s immersion.
All Known About Starfield Thus Far
Since its announcement, Bethesda has remained fairly tight-lipped about its next epic. The teaser trailer reveals a November 2022 release date, and confirms that the game will focus very much on space exploration.
Fans also know that the game will be set in an area known as The Settled Systems, which extends approximately 50 light years beyond the Solar System, and will take place in the year 2330. The player will control a member of The Constellation, a space exploration outfit whose priority is to understand the mysteries of the universe.
However, like many of Bethesda’s acclaimed open-world titles, Starfield will feature multiple feuding factions. The largest of these are the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective, who engaged in a bloody Colony War just twenty years prior to the game’s events. Fans will be keen to see how the tension between these groups, and other smaller organizations, is incorporated into the game’s main story and side quests.
In a recent “ask me anything” on Reddit, Bethesda’s Todd Howard confirmed more details about the game, including that it will be an action RPG and will feature a highly customizable main character, including the option to select between “he,” “she,” and “they” pronouns. He also mentioned that procedural generation was being utilized to create an expansive game world comprising many planets, similar to the approach taken by No Man’s Sky.
Although the game was only announced at E3 2021, work actually began immediately after the release of Fallout 4 in 2015, meaning that the game is already in a fairly advanced state. Fans are optimistic that it will therefore be able to hit its currently scheduled release date, although the pandemic will undoubtedly have had an impact.
Why Starfield Would Benefit from Forcing Players to Specialize
Starfield is an immensely promising title, and clearly one of the most anticipated games of 2022. However, if Bethesda really wants to win over its doubters, it needs to dispense with an immersion-breaking gameplay mechanic that has plagued its AAA open world games in recent years.
In Skyrim, it was possible for the player to pursue various different builds, ranging from a warrior to a warlock. However, the game’s quests did not prevent the player from succeeding regardless of their build, resulting in a situation where a legendary warrior could also become a powerful wizard at the head of the Mages Guild.
This sort of power fantasy might seem like a good idea, avoiding placing constraints on the player and allowing them to indulge in whatever quests and ambitions they want to pursue, but in reality some fans felt it eroded the game’s otherwise impressive sense of immersion. A game world that allows a player to work their way up to ruling a key faction is a rewarding one, but a game world where the same character can rule multiple warring factions simultaneously risks feeling silly and unrealistic.
Fallout 4 suffered from a similar issue with the membership of its key factions. Despite the Brotherhood of Steel, the Railroad, the Institute and the Commonwealth Minutemen all ostensibly being at odds with each other to varying degrees, the player can still join more than one of these factions, and does not need to definitively choose their alliance until very late in the game. Once again, some fans felt that allowing a player to join, or even to rule, multiple factions who were supposed to be at war with one another destroyed the immersion that the game’s designers had worked so hard to craft.
Furthermore, this approach erodes the sense of achievement associated with these major accomplishments. In Skyrim, becoming the head of a major faction ought to feel like a massive triumph, a reward for pursuing a particular Skyrim build to its conclusion. When players know that specializing in one skill set or character type early on is easily reversible later, it removes any sense of consequence from these decisions, and some players felt this made the game feel shallow and arbitrary.
There are other approaches available to Starfield, of course. Other successful action RPGs like Dark Souls and Bloodborne made it very difficult to fundamentally change a player’s early build by greatly increasing the cost of each additional “level up” — by the time players had invested repeatedly in a stat like strength, it became too expensive to boost other stats to compete, forcing them to stick with their early decision.
Fans eagerly await more information on Starfield in the coming months, and it is certain to be one of the biggest games of the coming year. Time will tell whether Bethesda decides to allow players to forge an omnipotent main character once again, or whether the developer takes a more measured and immersive approach.
Starfield releases in November 2022 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.