Starfield and Fallout

I have played a lot of video games this year, which is worthy of its own post. However, I recently finished Starfield, the huge RPG/shooter from Bethesda on Xbox and Windows. It was a huge release from the studio known for the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. It was the first new "world" that they had put into a game since Fallout. The idea was that it included a massive universe with a zillion planets to explore. Early reviews were critical to say that most of the planets had a lot of nothing in them. I started to play it but didn't go very far. The Fallout TV series started to stream on Prime, and I was so enamored with it that I immediately started playing that.

Fallout 4 is a few years old, but like Starfield, it was available on Xbox Game Pass. That's what's so cool about the subscription, is that you can try a huge number of games without having to buy them, for basically the cost of one game per year. Even for someone like me that I would describe as a recreational player, that's a huge value. Fallout has been a franchise forever, the basic story being that people were sold space in underground vaults to wait out nuclear war, and naturally this involves a post-apocalyptic world to run around in and shoot bad guys and mutants and stuff. I love the end-of-humanity genre, and the TV show just made me more interested.

With this game, I finally figured out what Bethesda's process was. Basically, there's a larger story arc to follow, with various paths, and then there are "factions" to work with that involve additional stories. On top of that, there are a ton of side quests to follow. It's the only variation on the massive game world design that I "got" enough to see it through. I understand though why some reviews of both games were critical, because if you don't understand the primary/faction/side quest structure, it seems like the game is just constant roaming. Fallout 4 managed to reveal the many missions with its, uh, mission menu. Once you get that, it feels like there's forward progress with the option to go about different ways. And there are different ways to go about reaching the end, which I thought was really entertaining. Also, the IP was so beautifully used in the TV show.

Starfield took this structure and made it even better. The slam dunk from a discovery standpoint is that the mission menu straight up separates the main line and faction missions, making it more obvious about how to "win" the game. The only negative is that it wasn't immediately obvious to me that I missed one of the faction stories when I finished the main story. So when I went back to this after Fallout, it felt familiar and improved. The level-ups were similar, the weapons and crafting to improve them were also similar. The added dimension was the use of space ships and crew members, and the crew was a more integral part of your movement through the stories. In fact, one of the achievements even was to reach the "highest level" of relationship. I tend to create female characters in these games (I guess as a reaction against old school shooters with dudes), and when I tried to flirt with one of my companions, it turns out he was gay and lost his partner prior to the story. Then I started traveling with a woman, and it turns out she was open to my advances despite concern for her home planet's view on same-sex relationships. So we got "married" and I got that achievement. Other NPC's came and went, and there were way more of them compared to Fallout 4.

I really liked both games. The depth of the story development, and the detail in the environment design was extraordinary. Fallout was great because it made bits of Boston a wasteland, with nature reclaiming everything, while Starfield created solid sci-fi motifs and truly weird stuff. It's obvious why these games take years to make with insane budgets, because there's a whole lot to create. And it's worth calling out that the technology on which you can play these things has come a long way, too. I played on a combination of the Xbox Series X and a Windows computer (more on that soon), and games are looking more and more like real life.

What's next for Bethesda? Indian Freakin' Jones, in December. It'll be on Game Pass as well. I can't wait.