ThatStarfieldDirect was big, huh? I don’t know why I always start with these pithy one liners, but I like to think it helps ease you in. Let me know if it doesn’t and you hate them, I guess. It was though, right? If there’s one word that we can all unanimously agree describes the Starfield Direct, Xbots and Sony Ponies alike, from hardcore gamers to filthy casuals, that word would be big.
It showed us a glimpse at just about everything that will be in the finished game. It went deep on the character creator, let us in on some of the jokes that the devs have been making with the free-form shipbuilding and piracy systems, and for some reason, showed us all the mining and base building we’ll all avoid, too. What it didn’t show us, however, was intelligent alien life.
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Before you get your spacesuit in a twist, don’t be mixing up the words ‘sentient’ with ‘intelligent’. Starfield showed off all manner of space critters in its hour-long advert, and you can interact with creatures great, small, and downright weird. Whether you’re set on cataloguing or killing them, there’s plenty of alien life to get your David Attenborough on across the thousand planets thatBethesdaso proudly touts.
That is all sentient life, correct. But is it intelligent? Intelligent life isn’t finding grasseous plains to graze on, intelligent life is cultivating the perfect flora to suit your diet. Sentient is stalking prey before killing it with your claws and teeth, intelligent is making weapons, no matter how crude. The only intelligent life shown in the hour of Starfield we saw at the weekend is humans, and that’s boring.
Bethesda said it’s taking a Nasa-punk (why is everything punk these days?) approach to its sci-fi, likely lending to a ‘hard sci-fi’ take, rather than a pulpy Mass Effect situation. It wants to be the Star Trek to Mass Effect’s Star Wars, so to speak. But Star Trek, for all its moralising and scientific grounding, has intelligent alien life. In fact, most episodes revolve around encounters with non-human intelligent lifeforms. It’s a staple of sci-fi and has been since the genre’s origins. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle was built on alien life, from The Word for World Is Forest’s Athsheans to The Dispossessed’s all-time great protagonist Shevek. Shelley’s monster, Wells’ Martians, Liu’s Trisolarians, all alien to some degree.
I hope I’m wrong, and Bethesda is keeping something in the wings to surprise us when Starfield releases in September. But when you’re showing scientific research nodes and the vast array of mining equipment, you’d think there’d be some room for the more exciting parts of space travel, too. I noticedStarfield’s similarities to No Man’s Skyin its resource-gathering, but Hello Games’ live-service title seems leagues ahead when it comes to alien life. From lizard dudes to bug dudes, it’s got a whole range of dudes to meet, and each has their own language, home world, and priorities in its procedurally generated universe.
I don’t think Starfield is going to hold a candle to Mass Effect’s characters or relationships – that’s not Bethesda’s strongest suit, let’s face it – so No Man’s Sky is the most obvious comparison. Near endless planets, a focus on exploration, all that goddamn mining, the similarities go on. What No Man’s Sky does expertly, however, is leave just enough on every planet you explore to pique your interest all over again. Just as you’re getting bored, you find some weird looking fella who looks like a koala or something, and you’re off on another wild quest across the galaxy.
No Man’s Sky knows that people, both human and alien, make its universe tick. After all, what’s the use of visiting a thousand worlds if you may’t make any friends while you’re there?
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