I’m writing mostly to fans of Bethesda RPGs here (because other people will probably find Starfield to be far more awful than excellent anyway), but I’m also writing to those who are interested in the question of how to balance realism and fun in depictions of space as they appear in science fiction games, movies, books, and whatever else.
The issue, put succinctly, is that space is really big and mostly empty.
To depict space realistically would be very boring. It would mostly involve traveling from one place to another, landing, taking off, traveling more, and more, and still more. And the places you would arrive at would generally be of interest only to scientists. If you and I landed on Mars right this instant, for example, with everything we needed to survive for a few years, we’d probably spend some time marveling at the scenery and being awestruck by the fact that we were on a completely different planet, and then we’d be bored. Very bored. There would be nothing to do, no one to talk to except each other. We’d be wishing we had brought an armful of good books or maybe a Bethesda RPG to fill the time.
None of this would make a very good game, especially not an open world RPG. Just imagine a game where you spent most of your time traveling between planets that had nothing to do except look at the views and check out the rocks. That kind of game, however realistic it might be according to our current understanding of space, wouldn’t sell many copies.
Of course, this is a version of a problem that faces all kinds games – how to balance realism and fun? Should a game be realistic enough that it requires a player to eat and drink in order to survive? How about sleep? How about going to the bathroom? Should games be realistic enough that characters die when shot once? Should they be able to heal extensive battle wounds by eating cheese (yes, I’m looking at you, Skyrim)? At what point does realism prevent enjoyment of the game? At what point does lack of realism make the game no longer feel good?
Various games approach this differently, of course. Survival games might have metres representing hunger, thirst, and exhaustion that the character needs to keep filled through some in game mechanic. Action games might have armour that in some way explains how a character can survive a gun shot or magic that can explain healing. These kinds of approaches all help games to balance realism with fun.
Space games do already have some of these established techniques to address the vastness of space. They usually have some sort of warp engine or faster-than-light travel to cross between star systems with a simple cut scene. They can also do away with the time involved with travel between planets, as well as landing and launching from planets, either by massively foreshortening distance and increasing speed (as in No Man’s Sky) or by the use of more cuts scenes (as in Starfield), neither of which are perfect, but both of which are functional. Travel on planet surfaces can also be minimized with foreshortened distances and various fast travel options, so the problem of the vast size of interstellar space has largely been addressed.
It’s the emptiness of space that remains a problem. How can a game possibly make all that space interesting and have it remain even remotely realistic? It simply isn’t possible to handcraft the thousands of locations that might make Starfield’s universe of a thousand star systems (or an infinite number of star systems, as in No Man’s Sky) feel consistently interesting. But having procedurally generated points of interest pop up randomly every kilometre or so on every landable surface (as both games do) quickly gets repetitive and boring.
It also feels startlingly unrealistic. Why are there only twenty kinds of structure in the universe? Why are all these little bases separate from one another? Why are there never any towns? Why do all the same kinds of base house the same kinds of NPC? Why is seventy percent of the universe a pirate or a mercenary? How does civilization even support all those damn pirates? How does the same story (bugs infesting a drilling station or mercenaries taking over a drug lab) occur dozens of times around the universe?
In a generated universe like this, the gameplay quickly becomes a grind. It’s no selling feature of your game to have a thousand solar systems if every system outside of the core few is the same, with the same enemies, the same locations, the same rudimentary stories, the same resources and points of interest. Despite an already unrealistic amount of stuff going on, there’s still nothing interesting to do in the galaxy.
And, if that’s all Starfield was, the game truly would be awful once the main story lines were complete. Thankfully, now and again, occasionally enough to feel realistic, the player stumbles upon unique handcrafted elements that feel almost miraculous compared to the rest of the grind.
You might come upon some guy’s island beach house, for example, where he’s been killed because he pissed off a bunch pirates. You might find a derelict ship floating in the void whose crew has been killed by a creature you can hunt down and eliminate. You might find an abandoned casino, its artificial gravity destroyed, that you must negotiate by jetpack to find whatever hidden valuables remain.
These moments reward the grind so well, surprising the player in ways that other procedural games like No Man’s Sky do not. They are the little excellences that make Starfield worth playing despite the elements of awful that weigh it down. So much so, that I think it points us toward a different approach to making game universes interesting.
We need do away with (or massively reduce) the procedurally generated content and let the universe be more empty. By all means, use procedural approaches to create the planets and also the flora and fauna (although even reduce this as well, to make it truly startling when you find it). Use them also to create random civilian research stations and mining operations (though many fewer of these too, please). Use them to create little settlements here and there where you can trade and work on your ship or get a quest or two.
But whatever you do, stop filling the universe with cookie cutter crap. Force players to search out adventures rather than stumbling on a thousand instances of the same military base everywhere they turn. And reward their searching with more handcrafted moments, scattered around, more instances of surprise and wonder and awe.
Those are the fundamental feelings of science fiction – surprise and wonder and awe. So don’t undercut them with the same relentlessly generated adventures. The universe is massive and largely empty. Let it feel that way, and then reward those who search it by offering them moments that feel unique and amazing.
That’s the approach, Bethesda. Make it so.
From Word to Word 