Videogame Houses: The Definitive Review

The Dude Abodes

In every BGSOWR¹, there comes a point where I commit to a house. I have reached that point in Starfield. This came quite late compared to other Bethesda house purchases, but a storage crisis pushed me into buying the bargain apartment in Akila. And lo, I did toil in my labours for at least three hours of urgent and necessary home décor placement. I have racked up an impressive amount of storage boxes² and have laid out crafting benches, the research table and even mission boards. The utility of this is abundantly clear, giving me a one-stop pad to facilitate that still very juicy loop of taking bounty hunter missions to acquire stuff in order to make me better, so I can have more fun in bounty hunter missions. The way this loop fluidly cycles is beautiful and in my opinion, is the best loop Bethesda has ever implemented. That narrow set of installations (comedically identical with each instance) is a big step on from the settlement policing of Fallout 4 and a generational leap from the radiant guff of Skyrim. Of course, it has those hilarious limitations, but I do wonder if that’s the result of some much braver and bolder procedural system being dropped because its jank was too much, even for Bethesda. Naturally, I’d embrace the jank at full force but I’m not sure the average gamer would feel the same way. Surprisingly though, after my initial feelings of disgust and dismay at having the same facility with the same props and the same logs and the same dead NPCs repeat across infinite missions, I have come to love the familiarity. It’s letting me optimise the action part of the loop, and letting me set personal objectives because I know the terrain. For example, I’m currently working through the levelling requirement for the final tier of the concealment skill, which would crown my stealth build’s ascent to maximality. This demands racking up 75 stealth melee strikes and with the damage modifier already at 8x, it’s pretty much a one-shot kill per strike. So I need to find 75 space baddies. I’m sure you could mechanically grind this out on a single planet with a crouching rampage against local wildlife, but I derive very little joy from bloodsports. Hence loving the bounty hunter loop. The fact that this same loop provides resource acquisition that channels into the same incremental tiers for the crafting skills pushes it over the top. If you take a considered view that the BGSOWR is best played as a player whim provider rather than a formal collection of narratives to be resolved, then the power and virtue of that loop becomes clear. As does my absolute love for this game. As such, the house becomes a root, a place that when visited signifies the end of one loop and the opportunity to either repeat or branch off for some other activity.

This is something that seems absolutely unique to the BGSOWR. I can’t think of any other game where the player’s house becomes an integral part of a player-determined play loop. Nor can I think of another game that allows the player to make their housing so utterly personal to them. For me, this carries immense value and satisfaction. The unconscious sense of having a sanctuary is quite potent. I remember the default apartment in Cyberpunk 2077 offering this oasis of calm solitude from the megablock it's situated in, marvelling at its noise-suppressant construction marking the contrast between the urban jungle and a place of respite³. But Cyberpunk’s abodes are ultimately as facile as those of Grand Theft Auto. They are mere movie sets where you get some choice in décor and can unlock a small handful of accessories, but not at the atomised level of a BGSOWR. They are chooseable, but not personalisable. I wrote about Judy’s apartment, and of dropping off meals on the floor in lieu of a decently functional relationship simulation, and that’s really the extent of Cyberpunk’s interest in player-mediated home customisation. In Grand Theft Auto V you can’t even drop things. The houses of Los Santos are vacuous spaces for empty lives, perhaps a subtle jibe at the catalogue-conformist consumerism far more potently critiqued in Fight Club, but nonetheless a tacit condonement of the player’s amorality, of their status within the game as criminal lotophagi⁴. In short, the houses are tokens for a tokenistic representation of a life. In many ways, the customisable settlements of Starfield and Fallout 4 are more than this. For some, they are the player’s life, as you can see with many an expansive township from Fallout 4 and countless more examples emerging from Starfield’s social media. 

In every other open world template, there is still the asserted dominance of the author and the central narratives which are the prime justification for the game in play. Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Horizon, Cyberpunk etc all work to cement a sense of inviolable authority from a central narrative, whereas the BGSOWR has become increasingly hands-off in that regard. The entire main storylines of both Fallout 4 and Starfield can be completely ignored, and yet the player can enjoy hundreds of hours of genuinely meaningful and rewarding creative play in terms of exploration and acquisition. Narrative content is available via sidequesting, but only if you want it. And this is perhaps the shining beauty of Bethesda’s conceit. The game is perfectly happy to let you ignore whatever you want. I would suggest that in the vast majority of other open-world titles, ignoring the main narrative generally means exhausting side content that occupies a distinctly supportive position rather than complimentary and, in Cyberpunk’s case for example, side content that is chaptered according to your progress with the main story. With this subservient relationship in mind, it’s really worth noting that the BGSOWR’s complimentary focal point of faction questlines is entirely independent of the main story, particularly in Starfield’s case. Again, the player is asked to choose what they want. Keeping on topic, consider that Starfield offers no less than three different types of home, a distinct step up from both Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Critically, mastering each type (and gaining access to the widest choice of options for them) comes with its own capacity to set up gameplay loops. It may seem initially unfair to separate outpost skills from spaceship building but that allows specialisation early on, when you want to direct efforts for short-term gains, such as customising a craft that can haul loads more stuff than the default. To gain the widest choice means working for it, and that alone is a meaningful goal that in a very real way, offers more spiritual nourishment than getting a bunch of magic powers for free because you went where you were directed and flew into some shimmery stars enough times. The game rewards initiative in this respect. It rewards having your own, personal goals and as such, makes the entire experience of play a deeper one. You genuinely earn your luxuries.

For a final celebration of BGSOWR houses, it’s easy to forget their status as a record of your path through the game. All of my BGSOWR houses have borne this, being places where I display all sorts of memorabilia that illustrate a visual biography. Skyrim was great for offering opportunities to display prized weapons and armour sets, or the full suite of Dragon Priest masks, statues of Dibella, various Daedric artefacts and so on. My Fallout 4 settlement had a long lineage of weapons in various storage chests, detailing my firearms progression, and hence my embattled journey, in a far more interesting and tangible way than a set of achievements. This pistol might recall some tight skirmish or a long term of dependability, another may bring up memories of questlines ending or even milestones in the stop-start process of turning the Red Rocket into a ludicrous one-man fortress. The point being that these player-selected tokens become deep signifiers for the in-world experiences. These virtual souvenirs carry the same emotional weight and value as real ones from real-world adventures. I will always decorate my houses with an eye to making friends laugh, but my friends never really see my houses. It’s an indulgence all of my own, mostly for my own benefit. And that, perhaps, is the crucial difference. If you must metricise a videogame like Starfield to offer some numerical score, how do you quantify its potential for indulgence? Its ability to support imaginative play? ‘One man’s trash…’ and all that. And I think it’s indulgence that is part of the BGSOWR magic. When you’re not authoritatively corralling the player to adopt some narrative path for their own good, you’re inviting them to indulge in their whims. And thus, making sure there’s provision for those whims is something Starfield admirably delivers as far as I’m concerned. A friend, who can never engage deeply with Bethesda’s worlds, said that I play them the way they’re meant to be played. Yet I rarely feel like I’m doing the game’s bidding. Instead, I feel pretty alive in the worlds. This is because that by allowing me to define my space, they’re letting me define my life.

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1. Bethesda Game Studios Open World RPG.

2. Premium, of course - I craft only the coolest contraband caches.

3. The default apartment was the best because it’s so stupidly close to a fast travel point. All the others, Judy’s included, seemed to not notice how remarkably important this is. I bought every single pad in Night City and they were all shit.

4. Can you fucking believe this is a real word?