Starfield: The Definitive Preview
How sandwiches saved my sanity
Hoarding sandwiches. That was my biggest takeaway from the Starfield presentation. Sandwiches exist as world objects, you can hoard them. It might not seem like that big a deal, but to me it’s everything. You see, I harboured a deep fear, an almost existential dread, that Bethesda might have walked back on one of the company’s most unique features. I had deep concerns that it had dumped an affordance that few others ever dared to implement and, for me, the source of immense feelings of joy and assured well-being. Being able to hoard sandwiches means the game is full of ordinary objects you can collect.
An absurdly long time ago, my first ever commission as a writer (a real one rather than the ghostly type) was a brief online series about my obsession with the self-generated metagame. Launching this was a piece on Skyrim and my extremely impressive cheese wheel collection. I didn’t measure it in the number of wheels, but in frame drops. Cometh the cheese cometh the chug, the ultimate objective being to force a crash upon entering the fromage chambre de la mort. My cheese room was simply the latest feature in a lineage of Bethesda homes that I’d tailored with found objects, making these spaces spectacularly personal, not to mention repositories full of genuine rarities. Take the torture tools; the game only has three sets, and two of these are locked out after mission completes, so you have to be on your toes to get them. Then there’s the quest items you can keep after completion. Pelagius’s pelvis being one I remember most fondly refusing to comply with my attempts to arrange it neatly on a table. These items all memorialise my journey through the game, in a far more personal way than trophy/achievement screenshot. The collector mentality is an impulse, but also a lifestyle. It’s a behaviour that’s always on, hence my eagle eye for the oddities in amongst the common adornments of Bethesda dwellings. From Oblivion onward, I’ve made my house a ludicrous dumping ground, finding deep joy in grisly collections of one-off body parts and viscera in cupboards, beds laden with jewels and gemstones. The Fallouts were no different, though slanted more towards ostentatious displays of weaponry and unique equipment, with lots of stockpiled ammo, stimpacks and radaway to give some tactical legitimacy to my hoarding.
The simple and entirely natural idea of collecting things to take home and keep is a surprisingly powerful one, but then it’s a primal instinct. And it’s saddening how Bethesda seems to be the only developer that sees any point in it. For on a deeper level, it actually displays an aspiration towards a richer simulation, a finer interactive resolution within the gameworld. It’s a further step along the path to parity with nature, perhaps the noblest of the videogame’s technical goals. I found Cyberpunk 2077 particularly disappointing in this regard. For all its posturing as the cutting edge of AAA, it couldn’t match the interactive resolution of Morrowind, a game now 21 years old. The open-world film sets of Ubisoft and Rockstar have never bothered to care, which I think underlines both companies’ attitude to the worlds they create. Those worlds feel somehow cheated of that next step. Emptier and less real than they could be. The world simulation may look finer and finer with each iteration but without that interactive step, that freedom to clatter around with other people’s stuff and steal it, the facade feels thinner. The trick becomes more apparent, the aspiration pointing towards something other than reality itself. It signals a more subordinate deference to prior media instead of the boldness to forge a path towards more complete simulations. And the more complete the simulation, the more multiplicative possibilities for gameworld interactions arise.
The contemporary discourse around Starfield is somewhat fascinating, if only for its seeming refusal to learn the lessons from Cyberpunk 2077 (or just about any whizz-bang preview revelation-fest) about expecting far more than has been shown, or is perhaps reasonable to demand. And also, this idea that you can be misled by stakeholders which you have always known have always sought to mislead (to some degree), in which case; why so naïve? But then to stretch expectations beyond the objective information provided, in which case; when has that ever ended well? I’m quite happy to curl up in my blanket of cynicism, happy with what I’ve already been shown. And I thought the showcase was really quite a lot to see. It was almost dizzying, a fabulous info-dump and a soothing salve to my anxieties that Bethesda might tailor Starfield toward the more moderate, industry-standard anodynic interactive designs of Cyberpunk 2077, the Ubisoft open-worlders or Sony-exclusive AAAs. That doesn’t appear to be the case, so I have little to worry about at the moment. I really don’t care about it being 30FPS. I absolutely don’t mind reductions of Starfield down to Skyrim x No Man’s Sky, particularly as an absolutely straight hybrid of both those games would be fucking brilliant, frankly. I love its ‘NASApunk’ visual style, a kind of carryover from Cyberpunk’s own aesthetic codes for space hardware. It’s an antidote to the embarrassed sleekness and invisible mechanisms of soft sci-fi and a signpost for realism, via the functional fetishism of Interstellar or perhaps more explicitly, The Martian and the peerlessly tech-fetishistic Gravity or, dare I say it, the absolutely real interiors and exteriors of the International Space Station. This shouldn’t be surprising as that $100bn+ bauble has managed to be a near-eternal ambient presence within Internet imagery for over 25 years1. Given the fairly twee genericism of the TES titles and the stilted ugliness of Bethesda’s Fallouts, Starfield’s visuals look fabulous. They make a nice counterpart to the 70s sci-fi stylings of No Man’s Sky, with less allusions to Foss and Elson than perhaps I’d like (you fucking know I’m putting stripes on my spaceship), but the hard clunk nevertheless warms my heart.
But let’s get back to those sandwiches: I now dream of an installation all to myself, purpose-built to store my hoarded gains. I can see rooms and rooms with different stuff, a stupendously quixotic storehouse, a towering monument to my personal sense of acquisitional mischief. I want a colossal, cavernous chamber that holds a single, isolated plastic duck (or Bethesda-approved equivalent). I’m practically salivating at the prospect and while there could still be an unpleasant rug-pull at the last moment, wherein it’s revealed that only sandwiches can exist as world objects or something, I feel utterly confident that I’m going to get my worth from Starfield. The beauty is that it can be literally Skyrim in spaceships and I’ll be perfectly satisfied. That is perhaps, the consolation of wisdom, of decades of experience in Bethesda’s worlds. I am also fully expecting a glorious palette of glitches and bugs. These define the Bethesda experience, surely? Aren’t they just the distorted fuzz on top of the lush analogue synths of a 70s sci-fi soundtrack? I almost want Starfield to be the equivalent of a temperamental CS-80, buckling under my Vangelis-like demands and showing some element of the uncontrolled, the unexpected. I’ll happily romance the notion that the game is so rich with detail and content, nothing could adequately test every combination for integrity. I really don’t buy that the 1,000 planets are all worthwhile destinations, but I am fucking desperate to get in on Starfield’s equivalents of the Thieves’ Guild and Dark Brotherhood. I mean come on, they have to be in there, right?
Shit, maybe they won’t be. TODD!
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Editor's note: at $10bn, we could have ten James Webb Space Telescopes for the price of the ISS, nearly 200 New Horizons Pluto probes or 33 Perseverance Mars Rovers, just saying. Can you imagine the kind of robots we could have with a $100bn investment? I mean holy shit I know space is expensive, but it’s ten times the cost for humans and, like, the one thing we’ve learned about humans in space from the ISS is that humans do *really badly* in space. And it’s not as if Mars is some ideal environment, either. A miserable red dustbowl that gives you cancer every 60 minutes, right? Fucking hell. And where else can you go? Fucking gondolas in the Venusian atmosphere? Fuck off. Let’s see how you do living on a hot air balloon in Earth’s atmosphere. You’d be screaming for an escape within a month, and that’s without the ground being hot enough to melt lead with atmospheric pressure that’d squish you flat, like the time-distort soldiers bit in Halo Jones. That’s without all the massively corrosive acid rain. The gas giant moons? Welcome to indescribable cold and instant cancer, yet again. Some of the most hostile radiation environments in the Solar System. You know that bit in Interstellar where they’re really close to Saturn and he’s talking about how thin the hull is? That means they’re all being horrifically irradiated by the insane particle accelerator that is the Saturnian magnetic field. Fabulous. Let’s just work on digitising consciousness for those insane 10-milennia flights to other stars, right? But hey - if we did spend all the human spaceflight budget on autonomous robots, they’ll be just as useful on Earth as they are on Mars. Where the fuck is my robot butler? With like proper hands and fingers and shit? Come on, man.