Starfield: A Bag and a Moustache

I poured fifty hours into Starfield. Enough to reach an ending, or a new beginning, anyway.

In those fifty hours, my feelings towards it shifted countless times. I was bored for stretches, and engrossed for others. At times I found myself adrift, blindly searching for the joy in exploration and rarely finding it. At others, my interest was renewed by gripping Faction Missions. For the first half, the main story missions were among the least interesting, but in the second, they became its finest feature. 

In some ways, Starfield might be the most dated AAA blockbuster I've ever played. I was astonished by how little things have changed since Skyrim, yet I found comfort in familiar treats. The universe is a largely empty playground, one which is desperate for your attention yet never quite earns it. However, I came to appreciate its vacuous qualities, where planets are sparsely populated and first contact with intelligent life is still but a fantasy for our space-faring, future-selves. We are alone, it seems. We're encouraged to traverse this wide-open space via a poorly explained and badly executed form of fast travel, which manages to negate the very exploration that is supposed to drive Constellation, the band of intrepid explorers to which we belong.

Dialogue can be downright weird, character models are disappointing, but the NPCs are likable and somehow imbued with character. This is in no small part due to the outstanding voice work. There are so many aspects of Starfield that I still don't fully understand, as they were poorly explained or never given a convincing reason to exist. What on earth is the point of outposts? How does pretty much anything related to space ships work? How do I quickly move to a known-location if it's not a destination for an active mission? Frustrating, yes, but it meant that there was always something new to learn, something I had yet to fully grasp; something unknown to pursue. How very Constellation.

Despite everything, I ended up really liking Starfield. Every time my interest waned something came along that made me sit up and pay attention. I'm convinced it deserves, perhaps even demands, another fifty hours of my time, and I may yet give it just that.

As evidenced by my disjointed ramblings above, ramblings that sound more negative than I'd intended, I'm still gathering and processing my thoughts on Starfield. I'm constantly revisiting it in my head, trying to make sense of why I enjoyed it so much. And each time I revisit it, I keep coming back to two seemingly insignificant moments that have inexplicably stuck with me. Two nonsense snapshots that are in my head, and now on the page.

The first is a relatively early main-story mission, one that sees you head to the unimaginatively titled Neon city. It looks like an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, but with neon stuff; cyber punk, but it smells of fish. You head there with Constellation's wealthy benefactor, Walter Stroud, to complete a shady transaction.

The deal goes down in a night club, because that's where cyber-punks do business. Video games have never been able to capture the chaos, grubbiness, noise, elation and disappointment of the clubbing experience, and it's no different here. Big Mass Effect 2-3 vibes on the sparsely populated dance floor. Oddly disquieting music, stiff dance moves, and a clientele that is mostly off its tits on a designer drug that every NPC can't wait to tell you about. Anyway, we weren't there to party; we had a seller to meet. Having cased the joint, I returned to Walter, who was hiding near the entrance. He informed me that our contact was here in the club, but unfortunately he had no idea what he or she looked like. The only clue he could offer was that they'd be carrying an over-sized bag, containing the goods we wished to purchase.

So I turned around and headed back to the dance floor to look for my bag-carrier. Well, much to my surprise, suddenly almost every prick on the dance floor was clutching a bag! Thirty seconds previously, no one had one. It had been a venue full of punters content to keep their belongings in over-sized pockets or foyer lockers, but now every drug-gobbler and two-stepper had a bag of some description. I haven't laughed that hard at a game in years! If you tried to converse with the wrong bag-person, they'd just do some party-whooping, or say something about drugs, and then resume their circuit of the dance floor, sports bag in hand. The funniest moment of 2023, bar none.

My second recurring memory of Starfield is the case of the vanishing mustache. There is a very good mission towards the end of the game where you respond to a distress call sent out by a research facility, but when you get there no one seems to be in distress. To cut a long story short, and keep the spoilers to a bare minimum, it quickly becomes apparent that we are dealing with alternate realities that are bleeding into one another. Cue a lot of timeline hopping to traverse the base, put things right, and grab another magic rock. 

I went out of my way to rescue one particular engineer, even though it could've doomed everyone else, simply because he had an excellent moustache. Bushy without being showy, perfectly suited to his face, and the result of weeks, if not months, of isolation without a shaving kit. I was delighted when, at the end of the mission, he offered to join my crew at a later date. He just needed a few days to get his shit together. There was a 'tache shaped hole in my crew that he was made to fill.

I was deeply disappointed when, upon meeting him next, he'd only gone and shaved! I still allowed him to join my crew, but I ignored him the rest of the way. A complete waste of time. My fun had been ruined by Bethesda's attention to detail, at least when it comes to regular shaving routines.

Other things happened in Starfield, probably, but they just didn't resonate with me in the same way.