It’s hard to make a good RPG. It seems like it should be simple, after all, people have been devouring them and the tabletop RPGs that spawned the genre for almost fifty years at this point. The formula looks a little bit like math. Take character creation, add in levels and their consecutive skill points, give us some cool quests and a fully realized world. Then, take that, let it bake for 4-5 years, and you get an RPG. Maybe it's an open world like Skyrim or maybe it takes place in multiple zones like Dragon Age. It could be turn based or real-time strategy like the fantastic Divinity: Original Sin or Pillars of Eternity. No matter what, the question that is always first when making an RPG is “how can I put more choices in the hands of the player?”
That question gets even more interesting when RPGs are strapped to an ACME rocket and launched into space. What does a space RPG look like? According to “Mass Effect”, there's still magic of a sort. Except to use it requires dangerous exposure to starship fuel and horrid surgeries to children. Still, it's space magic.
Alright, so that's cool, but what if there isn’t any magic?
Give it to Obsidian and make it a wacky land full of evil corporations. “Outer Worlds” is great, if in need of some serious Xbox money, the likes of which it now possesses. It's fun, there's still good progression, and my God look at the glorious skill checks that have largely been abandoned by modern RPGs (“Fallout 4” I’m looking at you). But, “Outer Worlds” couldn’t be very big. The budget was smaller, and the team didn’t have its Microsoft money yet. No, I want a BIG sci-fi RPG. I want a Bethesda sci-fi RPG.
I want “Starfield”.
Longtime Bethesda Managing Director Ashley Cheng said in a recent interview with the Washington Post the game feels like a “Han Solo simulator” or “Indiana Jones in Space” (though I gotta point out, aren’t those two things pretty much the same?).
The man himself, Bethesda Game Studios Executive Producer Todd Howard, said “Starfield” is “Skyrim in space”. While it's getting a bit cliché to compare new Bethesda games to past ones (“Fallout 3” will forever be known as ‘Oblivion with Guns’), my first thought was “that is exactly what I want.”
In terms of gameplay, we know nothing, so I won’t speculate on that just yet but the latest gameplay trailer was absolutely dripping with a certain modern-tech in a future setting vibe, with physical buttons and rough ugly spaceships that would be better found in Amazon’s “The Expanse” than the sleek, digital display having, omni-tool reliant world of “Mass Effect”.
While watching it, I could never really find the right words to describe this art style. It was something I was familiar with, but also from the far flung future. When I read the game’s Lead Artist, Istvan Pely, dub the style “NASA Punk”, the freshly coined phrase immediately connected with me. That was exactly what I was looking at and I was in love. The age of too sci-fi-sci-fi has dusked, long live NASA Punk. Now, when I look at “The Expanse” I see the manifestation of NASA Punk. When I look at “Mass Effect”, I see a lens-flare ridden J.J. Abrams movie. But you know, WAY better.
Back in 2015, Todd Howard took the stage for Bethesda’s 2015 E3 presentation where we got the still amazing long look at “Fallout 4”. There, when discussing the art, he talked about how the art team had hand-crafted everything, every blinking light, knob, switch, and door handle. Starfield looks like the evolution of that, but in space. While the short trailer was a good look at the small-scale attention to detail that Bethesda is known for, the concept art that was subsequently released made me breathe a sigh of relief at seeing the cities and beautiful locales that Bethesda is also known for. We got one look at a huge city glimmering in a dome. In another, a forest vista that looked as if I were playing “Where’s Yoda.” One more looked so familiar, I had to make sure I didn’t accidentally click on an article about “Star Wars” because it looked just like the dusty hive of scum and villainy that is Mos Eisley.
While we didn’t get any details about gameplay, something I found encouraging was when Todd said in his interview with the Telegraph. he wanted Starfield to be a more “hardcore RPG.”
While “Skyrim” was a smash hit and probably my most beloved game of the era, it did have its detractors. The primary gripe was that Skyrim signaled a transition away from a “Morrowind” style RPG into something that was more approachable for a wider audience. There were hardly any speech checks, the leveling system was simplified, and player choice regarding the decisions you could make were more limited. In “Fallout 4”, this was doubly so. There were hardly any speech or skill checks that the series was known for, whether it be the original Fallouts or the newer ones of the late 2000’s helmed by Bethesda themselves or the beloved Obsidian made “Fallout: New Vegas”.
While you could argue either way that streamlining the experience did help bring in the more casual audience that doesn’t want to min/max everything they do, it took it a step too far in the name of garnering that audience. Was this because developers at the time thought that an old school “hardcore” RPG wouldn’t click with a greater audience? Most likely so. In years since, I think the larger gaming audience had proven, in a sense, that what we want is a return to form for RPGs. Gimme the advanced level up system, skills and speech checks, dialogue trees that aren’t simple button presses that give me 1/10 of what is actually being said. I want the works.
I want speech and skill checks out the window because there's so many of them the house runneth over. When I start a new RPG, my focus is on getting speech up and building my tech or mechanical skills up so I can fix that robot to help me fight, or bypass that one area because I expertly hacked a computer. I think that's one reason “Fallout 4” is one of my least played Bethesda games. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of time in the title and it does so many things right. I even made a John Marston character I only wear a cowboy hat with and use a revolver because that's fun. The crafting in it was cool as well, if not a bit too broad. “Fallout 4” does a lot of things right but is it a Bethesda RPG? Almost. The worldbuilding is superb, the quest and locales are fun, but I just can’t put the complete stamp of approval on a game that lacks a lot of the R in RPG. While I can pretend my character is gun-slinging protagonist hell-bent on a mission to rid the scum one fan of the hammer at a time, in reality I’m still looking for my son.
To hear that Bethesda wants to get back to those roots is fantastic. Coupled with how big Todd wants to make his new IP, I can only imagine the possibilities. We have one robot companion named Vasco who is present, but according to The Washington Post, there is going to be a variety at launch. Can I use my tech skills to fix one up and bring it back to my ship? Can I ignore it altogether? A good RPG in my opinion is good because it gives you a lot of things to do, and that includes ignoring some stuff altogether.
The possibilities are endless, just like space, and I am beyond excited to see more of Starfield. As it is coming out November 11th of next year, we’ll get a good chunk of gameplay at the next E3 presentation. Until then, I’m going to try and practice holding my breath to prepare for the endless vacuum of space so I can really immerse myself in the game when it releases next year.
Comments