Thoughts on Starfield: Youthful Fancies of Trains and Death
The piece I meant to write first and took 4 more weeks to complete since the last time I wrote.
So Two major things happened this year: I turned 50 and Bethesda released Starfield, a game I had kinda, somewhat heard about for the last decade and change. As you can imagine I greeted the release of the game with far more warmth than yet another anniversary of my existence. What I was not prepared for was how the game, like my birthday, left me with an acute sense of anticipatory loss as I acknowledged, again, my proximity to death.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t like the game. I absolutely love Starfield. I assume if you’re reading this you have a passing knowledge of my regard for Bethesda’s style of immersive sim/power fantasy. I dig ‘em all the way back to Morrowind and I, for one, thought immediately upon announcement that the Fallout franchise was well suited to their style so my expectations for Starfield were primarily, “I cannot wait to play a new Bethesda game” than the “Ohmygoitmustbethebestthingeverinallofhistory” which apparently was the attitude of more than a few folks who think solely in pull quotes.
My initial surprise upon starting up Starfield was just how different it felt, in terms of pacing, the effect of the “big push” (or whatever Todd refers to the moment when the enormity of the endeavor becomes apparent) and, most surprising of all, that it was oftentimes very, very relaxing. A lot of these impressions might be the result that this was also the first time I played a Bethesda game solely on my schedule (except the first 2 days I averaged 2-3 hours a day). There was no pressure to get it done in order to fire up another major release at year’s end. Ironically this was also the first time I played a Bethesda game from beginning to end (all the major quests I could find) without stopping down to play something else. Whether playing the game so thoroughly in one go was the cause or effect of my pleasure is unclear but, regardless, Starfield hit me differently.
How it hit me so differently comes down to the sense of relaxation I felt so frequently, itself an outgrowth of one of Starfield’s core themes, the reward of exploration for its own sake. Where Fallout and Elder Scrolls are more collected around the notion of “survival with the side-effect of dominance” and present rewards through adversity, Starfield wants the player to just go somewhere else, combat may result from exploring but it’s just as likely you’ll end up playing Pokemon Snap for Adults while scanning plants and rocks.
In that way I could adapt the game to my mood. If I felt distracted and possibly incapable of following simple directions, I would aimlessly scan planets and accidentally die from gas plumes directly in front of me. Days where I felt short on life accomplishments were perfect for playing substantive missions that felt like there was significantly more meat on the bone in their chapters than similar styled quests in Skyrim or Fallout 4. In the middle of these two moods were also the surprisingly frequent sojourns that metastasized into a much bigger quest. Sure, it delayed dinner by an hour but the organic discovery of the process is worth it.
What I think lies at the core of Starfield’s unexpected, yet welcome pace was the story. Not so much the actual story (although, once you understand everything that’s going on it is relevant) but that it’s not about the imminent demise of the world for once. One of the biggest jokes around the Mass Effect series is the existential obliteration of all things you must keep from happening and the seemingly selfish motivations that would drive Shepard to take time off for fucking and dancing. Ever so deftly Starfield presents circumstances that are life-changing but not in an apocalyptic sense. It allows for investigation, consideration and diversion to arrive at the narrative destination. It’s consistent with the role playing in Starfield to dick around and do your own thing on your own schedule.
The one exception in playing Starfield in small bursts daily was playing A TON over the initial couple of days and, damn, I’m glad I did. Those opening hours dramatically demonstrate that Starfield is not following the pacing and structure of earlier Bethesda games. Yes, it’s still “small person becomes very, very important” but that mystery and wrangling the complexities of the universe you exist in unfurl languidly and it took about a day and a half for a rhythm of play to come together and there were some truly rough patches in that process. Docking at my first space station was as far from Kubrickian elegance as I am from joy. Learning how to add inventory space to my spaceship was all the confirmation I needed that I belonged in a retirement community. Many of these issues have been detailed in the past two months by others but I can’t help but think that if I played those initial 15 hours in small bursts if I wouldn’t have stayed for the rest of the game.
This whole issue touches on something I've been fascinated by; who is the invisible, unknown person that a videogame assumes is playing? Nintendo assumes you can’t even spell the word “game”, FromSoft assumes you have no other responsibilities in life including evacuating your own waste, Bethesda, I've felt, has assumed you’ve played one of their games before which has worked just fine until Starfield where having played one of their games puts you a disadvantage because it doesn’t effectively warn you not to apply most of that knowledge. My 11-year-old godson who is my living “zero level reading” in video games adapted immediately to Starfield (except the inventory expansion, that one is unforgiveable in my book) and didn’t find anything tedious in the opening hours and turned every combat instance into something out of Halo 3 and I’m certain it's because he doesn’t even know Skyrim exists.
How on earth, though, can a game telegraph this to the experienced player without kicking down the fourth wall and taking a shit on it? I don’t know but I haven’t stopped thinking about it and I'm certain I’ll be elaborating on this in the future.
But this whole ramble, like life, has been a diversion to its inevitable destination; death. Yup been thinking about death a lot lately, especially the new wartime qualifications on worthy life which is one of the reasons it took 4 weeks to get this damn essay done. The past year, one which I've spent trying to divorce myself as much as possible from the yoke of the audience I created in the 25 years preceding, has confirmed my belief that the hill I’m on slopes downwards, not a decline in quality but there is decidedly less in front of me than behind. This past year is also an attempt to get away from the death I was hurtling myself towards with alcoholic abandon and the quiet acknowledgement that my downward trajectory hits the end of the line sooner as a result. Hitting 50 brought this up.... a bit. My therapist warned me about it, older friends said I'd get gloomy and the wistful yearning for one more moment where I felt like I looked good and my knees didn’t hurt did occur, but it was playing Starfield that truly knocked the wind out of me.
Back in 2000 there was a Fin de Siècle IBM ad on television that became popular enough to be a point of reference (it’s like a meme but when people talk to each other). Avery Brooks ranting about it being the year 2000 and how there weren’t any flying cars, how he was promised flying cars. It was a clever ad in many ways but at its heart was the underwhelming nature of the millennial crossover, Y2K wasn’t even real and reality fell far short of our sci-fi fantasies.
Well, while playing Starfield and feeling that odd pleasure on take-off from some insignificant rock I just reduced to the sum of its mineral and vegetable elements it hit me that such an amazing thing wasn’t going to happen in my lifetime. All that awe and wonder that Starfield delivers on and makes fundamental, in my real life it will be resigned to the world of speculation and creativity. I will have no flying cars.
Not just flying cars. When I was 21 (1995) I had what I still consider to be the Best Job Ever. I was an archivist for UCLA, which had been given the papers of Tom Bradley, the first black and longest-serving mayor of Los Angeles. My job was to open up boxes and catalog what was in them, pretty much taking inventory on the history of Los Angeles as it became one of the most significant urban centers on Earth. Yeah, for me that’s better than hosting a TV show about games any day of the week.
One of the most interesting finds in the boxes related to one of the original aborted plans for high-speed rail service in California that could connect Sacramento-San Francisco-Fresno-Los Angeles-San Diego in a convenient 2–3-hour trip that would rival the trains (then) in Japan and France. At that time my head swam with the implications of such an innovation; this was the beginning of the west coast megacity, the potential to connect the agricultural center of the state with its economic engines, I wouldn’t have to endure the degradation of LAX, the future looked...futuristic.
It’s 2023 and we still don’t have those trains and air travel in California is as appealing as Cholera in a love hotel. As I played Starfield I thought about how not only am I never going to see the flying cars but the moribund high-speed rail project, at best, would be completed by the time I'm advised not to travel.
Understandably the depiction of an unrecognizable, desiccated Earth in Starfield is unsettling for many but for me the depictions of a fully realized era of space travel drove home that the world of fantasy I've spent my life in is only that. So much of one’s time covering the game industry is spent looking around the corner to see what’s coming which in itself functions as an apostrophe for a much larger and seemingly endless cascade of advances and wonder that bring light to mysteries and solve eternal riddles. Awash in Starfield I was hit with such pleasure to be playing a game that brought banality to the impossible that I had to catch myself and make sure I enjoy it while I’m there.
Things of Interest last week:
Mrs. Dalloway
When Evil Lurks
The Royal Hotel
Violet Beauregarde satellite from Craftsman and Wolves
Shingles Vaccine