Agreed but let me add one more: the NG+ nonsense is unfixable or at the very least, making it not gay is a herculean task, so much so you'd probably be better off making an entirely different game out of it.
It was a wasted opportunity if I've ever seen one. The climax is a non-climax. At the end of Starfield, when you discover that you're in a Groundhog Day Loop of the events of the game, competing with other immortals to retrieve the artifacts and advance to the next universe, the actual story should be just fucking beginning. The game ends right as it introduces a huge new concept to the story that it does absolutely fuck-all with. Yes, Constellation's makeup can be randomized in the NG+. Yes, some lines of dialogue may be changed around here and there. However, nothing of any real consequence happens in NG+ (aside from, perhaps, saving your best friend in Constellation from the Hunter using your foreknowledge of events). This is why Emil's a complete dumbass. If you're going to have a parallel universe plot like this, then you need to actually do something with it. Did they? Nope. Even after you become a Starborn yourself, the other Starborn are still just random mooks with no actual relationship to the player.
There should have been a whole separate Starborn faction questline that would
only be accessible in NG+. There should have been more dimension-sliding shenanigans like in Entangled (arguably the coolest quest in the game). There should have been a whole ten or twenty additional main quest missions about the player character basically making the universe their bitch. Instead, it ends at what should rightly be considered the halfway point of the story.
And, as I've said before, I find it incredibly sad that a game that bills itself as being "a story about exploration" is definitely
not that. It's anything but. It's a bog-standard thriller plot.
The universal theme or
CONTROLLING IDEA of a Thriller story is:
"Life is preserved when the protagonist succeeds in unleashing their unique gift, but death or damnation triumphs when they fail to do so."
The exploration parts of Starfield have nothing to do with the story at all. Constellation are mostly a bunch of highfalutin urban socialites and posers who disdain the great outdoors, minus the one redneck and the one crazy gay black dude. The "exploration" parts of Starfield are brief sojourns into empty and pointless procedural worlds with quest markers pointing the way to your objective. It's basically a dialogue-free affair. You bring a companion along, they ooh and ahh at the sights, and then you return back to New Atlantis or wherever to turn in the quest. There are radiant quests and repeatable shit you can do, prospecting for minerals for industrial outposts, or going through the agonizing process of completely scanning planets and all their flora and fauna and minerals and turning the data in to Vlad for the reward, but there aren't any story missions that are specifically
about exploration. The whole plot centers on pointless human social drama and there is no environment-centric storytelling of any kind. There isn't even a "discoveries" system like No Man's Sky where you can track all the things you've cataloged. Most of the planets you visit have abandoned human outposts on them, so you're just retreading the same ground as others; you aren't even studying or prospecting unknown worlds at all. It's just utterly mind-blowing to me, how shallow the "exploration" part is, in a game that is billed as being
about exploration.
Come to think of it, I don't think a lot of people nowadays even know what the fuck exploration
is. Real explorers were fucking hardcore as fuck. The guys who tried to reach the South Pole with sled dogs and the climbers who summited Everest before shit like GPS existed all had hilariously gigantic brass balls. Most game developers seem to have this notion of exploration that basically consists of walking around in a public park and touching grass for a few minutes, maybe zooming in on a strange beetle with your smartphone camera. Like, imagine the most milquetoast soyfaggot idea of exploration, and then multiply the faggotry by ten. Where is the sense of danger? Of personal risk? Of actual discovery? Oh no, I’m being chased by another Douglas Adams technicolor insectoid reject. Better empty a whole mag of shotshells into it before it eats me, and then return to New Atlantis for my TerraBrew and hang out with my polyamorous friend Bill Fucknut and his boyfriend. Bethesda don’t know what exploration even is. It’s a buzzword to them. It’s something that backwards and primitive people did, before the world was mapped out to the centimeter. “Our game has exploration, which means you can kinda-sorta recreate the sensations of something our ancestors might have done, we think, maybe, we’re not sure.”
Real explorers had to deal with shit like frostbite robbing them of toes and fingers, starvation, equipment failure, getting caught in avalanches and floods and mudslides, encountering new plants and fungi and wondering if they’re edible or poisonous, being stalked by ravenous animals, having to treat wounds with improvised medical equipment, and having to jury-rig all sorts of shit. Again, where is the sense of exploration? Where is the
story about exploration? There’s nothing. It’s land somewhere, walk to quest marker, shoot rando mooks, pick up plot coupon, walk back to the ship. That’s it.
Next to no one will ever voluntarily scan a hundred planets in a row in this game. It just won’t fucking happen. The scanning mechanic is a brief diversion from the meat of the game, which basically consists of talking to clay-faced automaton people or shooting them.
Imagine if there was an entire questline where your objective is to gather plant, microorganism, and animal specimens to look for bioactive compounds for use in drug manufacture, and you have to actually prepare samples in a lab and shit. I mean, this has a real-world precedent; just think of Penicillin, right? It’s even mentioned in passing by one NPC. You don’t even do anything like that. You do very little actual science. You can equip your ship with a science lab, but it’s only used to progress down the tech tree and unlock useless shit like outpost buildings you will never build. I mean, you don’t even do stuff like lug around scientific instruments to various planets to collect seismic or hydrological or weather data or anything. Most of what you actually do in the game is function as a generic murderhobo protagonist who is an explorer, scientist, and prospector in name only.
This shouldn’t be hard for devs to figure out. There are shitloads of diaries and autobiographical accounts of real explorers throughout history to draw on for inspiration. Did they read those? Nope. Instead, they mashed a generic Mil-SF thriller with a generic cyberpunk story and called it a day.
I mean, think about this. Even the Tomb Raider reboot games have more exploration than Starfield. You actually can go off the beaten path to find collectible trinkets with their own distinct lore. What does Starfield have? Another identical POI with pencil holders and coffee mugs with sassy sayings you can loot?
There’s no fucking exploration in a game that’s supposedly about exploration. That’s fucked up.
