Arthur Parallax On Starfield
2Ah, 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.
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