Starfield

Starfield's greatest offense is not its occasional bugs or its truly dull main storyline.

It is instead a stifling, almost ideological mediocrity. It is a work immersed in a malaise so persistent and drab that it becomes difficult to see it from moment to moment.

Contrasted against soaring language about the importance of exploration and the liberation of space is a game that manages to advance from its forebears only through a combination of features that existed a decade ago and, since that time, have only been made less painful to interact with rather than actually rewarding.

Anyone who claims Starfield is the worst game of 2023 is absolutely wrong, but that manages to be to its detriment. Something so bad at such a scale would be interesting, a mark Starfield never really achieves on its own merits.

I'll admit to a fascination with "failed" media—look at my play time with this game—and what sets Starfield apart is that it isn't really even bad in any one way that manages to be interesting. Instead, the game simply refuses to try anything that might become interesting. From almost the very beginning, the game throws the player into space with a ship that can effectively go anywhere. This is an absolutely catastrophic decision that immediately presents the scale of the game.

A more artistic mind might have tried to create some message or deeper experience with so immediately setting the player loose. I can easily imagine a story about how even given so much freedom so early, it manages to be dwarfed by the scale of everything ahead and everything the player has to do, such that the ability to do anything becomes a barrier to what the player must do.

Instead, the game creates a benchmark that never budges, couching this as some sacred mandate to explore. It is a toothless Manifest Destiny not motivated by the struggle of humanity in the aftermath of a home lost and a planet-scarring war. There isn't even the mention of some need to conquer. Instead, the player is placed in the role of a person mindlessly hoving among the idle malaise of a humanity that has already done everything interesting it will ever do.

The player listens to po-faced NPCs talk about the grandeur and scope of an adventure that is almost exclusively a series of fetch quests broken up with space combat that manages to be more dull than frustrating. This creates a friction between how the game talks about itself within its own world and the extremely mundane experience of actually moving through that world. This is a rare example of a time there's no better description of how a game has failed than ludonarrative dissonance—a phrase I feel more passion about disliking than Starfield made me feel at any point in time.

Alexander the Great wept for want of worlds to conquer. Starfield's humanity, meanwhile, has grown too bored to mourn.

There are brief moments when a better game that is still a Bethesda Game is plainly visible. There are a handful of decisions that steadily become more obvious that if made or if simply as the product of a studio less bogged down by its own cultural cruft, would have made for a vastly better experience. None of these manage to provoke anger. There isn't even a feeling of sadness over what could have been.

Instead, mediocrity permeates every moment. It hangs over the experience like a dense fog, never letting it move too fast, never letting anything happen that isn't immediately obvious.

Personally, I'm more or less unbothered by the barren, procedurally-generated planets. In a game that takes advantage of a natural feeling of isolation, a player would be given more tools to traverse a vast, desolate landscape to find rare and valuable treasures whether experiential or in the economy of the game world. There is something compelling about traveling vast distances that are rendered are deeply insignificant by the scale of the cosmos yet vitally important on a human level, all the while threatened by a universe lethally indifferent to the fragile life moving through it.

Instead, we are dropped onto a map of fast travel points with an accidental stamina-budgeting minigame to go speak to a cookie-cutter NPC who, like an infinite panoply of others, requires that we go to a cave to find his friend because in the distant space future, there are no radios.

In creating an experience free of significant frustration, they have also gutted any feeling of grandeur or freedom. Bethesda made a walled garden and filled it with plastic plants.

Another studio would have looked at Starfield late in its development and realized that ahead of them was a year of post-launch support and refinement on the "good bones" of what they released. Instead, Bethesda will not do this.

Bethesda seem comfortably certain that people are merely wrong about what was enjoyable about their games, that something has changed with us. To some degree, that's true. The gaming audience of 2023 has more choice than ever, more opportunities to seek novel experiences, a vast glut of games that allow them to find their own story. A callous or perhaps craven individual might call this entitlement. A more honest one, the natural evolution of an artistic medium.

Bethesda have decided to strip away all but illusory choice, something that could have been made interesting in a game about the vast scale of space and humanity's place in it. They committed to the idea that the deep, human drive of roving exploration, the same spirit that scattered ancient humanity across the Earth, can be encapsulated by a hazy, gesturing spiel from a group of explorers who seemingly can do nothing on their own and a dozen or so repeating events among a thousand worlds.

They have taken a story about humanity stripped of its origins, a scattered diaspora of mankind finding their footing in a galaxy not made for us, and made it deeply boring.

In this one way, Starfield is a deeply fascinating piece of media. It bears a message that if any more forceful would be hatefully cynical, but here is too emotionlessly bored of itself to have anything to say.

It is a look into the bizarre psychology of people who seem to have no concept of majesty, no belief in the importance of beauty, and who do not appear to understand humanity.

As all things made by human hands, Starfield is an act of communication. Whether made by an individual or a collective, art represents a beautiful human need for the transmundane. Humans have long been obsessed with the idea that a world exists beyond the immediate and material and that thought itself is a potent motive force in the world as we perceive it. Starfield's disinterest in that communication of one of the most primal and truly human instincts sits on my chest like a weight, yet it is one neither crushing in its cruelty nor challenging in its heft. It is too-smooth oatmeal that has gone the slightest bit cold, hardly offensive enough to be memorable.

In Starfield—both the game itself and its universe—there is no art, no craft, only the faint simulacra of meaning.

It is a hell of what waits for us beyond the hyperreal of today as described by Baudrillard, a world without even false meaning.

Bethesda have claimed the failure to “understand” Starfield comes in part from players not appreciating that the desolation of space is not inspiring or inherently fun, but that meaning must be found. It is, they have claimed, a sandbox where we must find our own definition of the game and its message and that only when we have found something satisfactory have we divined meaning from their world. In this way, Starfield is not a post-modernist work as they claim meaning is not created from interpretation but whole cloth. Starfield is the first post-structuralist game.

This is, of course, not true.

Instead, a series of entirely banal choices and surely some number of failures to make a choice have created an experience that occasionally meets only the most technical definition of the word “experience” as something that occurs during the forward motion of linear time. They have created an experience vaguely reminiscent of waking up on a day with nothing better to do and spending several minutes staring at the ceiling, except Starfield fails to provide an experience that is either restful or contemplative.

Again, haunted by its own mediocrity, Starfield does not present a mirror to our failures to create lives of beauty and meaning. It does not even render its own world with sufficient fidelity and verisimilitude to motivate us to see ourselves in its uninteresting sandbox as an act of ludic pareidolia. Bethesda have given us the challenge of being presented with nothing and rather than finding meaning, simply accepting that we are closer to death for having experienced it.

In this way, Todd Howard has become not Jean Baudrillard, but Werner Herzog.

In summation: 6/10. Maybe they'll patch it later. It’s nice to hear Elias Toufexis, but Bethesda’s VA direction underserves his talent.