Tilting at Starships: Starfield and the Knights of the Sorrowful Face
Eddie Muller, the "Czar of Noir", once opined that peak American culture occurred in the 1950s. For all the failings of America during those early post-war years, it is hard to argue with that take. Not only was it a "Golden Era" for Hollywood - some of the greatest films of all time were made during this period - but it was also considered a golden era for science fiction. It was during this time that such greats as Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Alfred Bester, and the visionary editors of Galaxy Magazine, who pushed the genre toward psychological and sociological storytelling, came into their own. Even radio, the then-dominant entertainment format, got in on the sci-fi act with such wonderful programs as X Minus One and Exploring Tomorrow. You can still listen to many of them today.
These radio series can be an excellent ‘deep core’ survey of the genre, covering tonally diverse classics from Tom Godwin’s heartbreaking hard‑sci‑fi tale The Cold Equations to Robert Sheckley’s lighter, satirical The Lifeboat Mutiny. They are the next best thing to picking up a copy of the many ubiquitous Best Science Fiction of.... books out there.
Whether in print or on the radio, such anthologies demonstrate that, as with any other genre of entertainment, one cannot consider oneself a true connoisseur (or "fan", if you prefer) until one is familiar with the "classics." Sadly, as with cinema and literature, many self-proclaimed science fiction enthusiasts are extremely well-versed in the contemporary franchises - including the waking nightmare that Star Wars has become under Disney - but are virtually illiterate when it comes to the bedrock works of the genre. And that ignorance has consequences. It shapes expectations. It narrows imagination. And, I would argue, it fuels the pathological hatred surrounding Bethesda’s newest franchise, Starfield. It isn’t Starfield that has failed its audience; it’s the audience that is failing the genre that birthed Starfield.
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Before I go any further, let me be clear: I’m not here to play the role of Bethesda apologist. Starfield launched with three very real, very legitimate problems that even a devoted sci‑fi fan like myself couldn’t hand‑wave away.
The first was the near‑total absence of meaningful spaceflight at launch. Frankly, this was a design decision so idiotic that it could only come from the groupthink bowels of a modern corporation, and must rank up there with the infamous New Coke decision of boneheadedness. By removing free-roaming spaceflight from a game about, you know, spaceflight, Bethesda hamstrung their own creation in a very noticeable way. Instead of being a game about both "dirtside" and outer-space exploration and adventure, the balance was thrown off in a 60%-40% direction that favored being less the astronaut and more the planetary hiker. This imbalance was further exacerbated by the absolutely fantastic job the Bethesda team did on the game's spaceship interiors, which are modelled with marvelous detail. (It is worth pointing out that Starfield had these wonderful interiors long before No Man's Sky added them, so stick that in your spacesuit respirator and inhale it.) By gimping spaceflight to a mere bubble located in the immediate vicinity of a planetary body, Bethesda effectively turned these vehicles into lightspeed-capable recreational vehicles that spent most of their time parked on a landing area and used as a basecamp. Frankly, the decision to hobble space travel is so bewildering to me that I am forced to conclude that the systems we would get in the (excellent) Free Lanes update just weren't ready for release, forcing Bethesda to cut the system to the quick. I mean, it had to be that because assuming an experienced game developer would choose to remove spaceflight from a game all about space exploration for any other reason would be too crazy to take seriously.
The second major structural flaw was the broken procedural Point‑of‑Interest system, which scattered the Settled Systems with repetitive locations that undercut the sense of discovery the game was supposed to evoke. I recall how, after coming across my third copy‑pasted magma processing facility in just as many hours, I felt a cold sweat trickle down my spine. "Surely, Bethesda didn't just populate the Settled Systems with a mere handful of locations to discover?" I asked myself. It certainly seemed that way to me and many others at launch. Happily, this was another launch flaw that was corrected with the recent Free Lanes update - apparently, the PoI spawning algorithm was not operating as expected, causing PoI repetition - but at the time, this was yet another hamstringing flaw that served to harm the game's appeal.
Lastly, an all-too-common problem with AAA game studios reared its ugly head with Starfield: Bethesda stopped communicating with its fans. Why these larger studios have no problem using social media to push every new release or DLC announcement but seem utterly incapable of using it to address ongoing development is beyond me. While Bethesda was quite good at communicating with the community about Starfield in the months immediately after release, by the start of the following year, it had gone into a communications blackout. Now, if Starfield was in a good position post-launch, that might have been tolerable. But when you have a game that is being (unfairly) smeared by a mob, the worst possible thing a company can do is go silent because that communications vacuum will be weaponized against it. And this is precisely what happened as the haters and the more gullible video game journalists started spreading rumors that the game was being abandoned, something defenders were unable to refute due to the lack of communication from Bethesda. Matters were made worse when, after being dunned by their fans for some news - any news! - Bethesda, in early 2025, said that big news would be coming soon. "Soon" apparently meant the end of 2025, for it was only many months later when details about Terran Armada were announced. The long stretch of silence just made matters worse.
Sadly, this dreadful communication strategy is one that still plagues Bethesda:
These were real flaws - structural flaws - and Bethesda has now addressed two of the three. But here’s the thing: while these issues were legitimate problems for the game, they were not fatal. The PoI system was quickly addressed by the active modding community, as was the lack of space travel, albeit with more difficulty. At this point, if Starfield were published by any studio other than Bethesda, its flaws would have been ignored in favor of its many virtues. But that didn't happen. Why? I believe the haters' grievances run deeper than mere gameplay issues and reveal something about the modern sci‑fi audience itself.
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One can learn a lot about an audience's mentality just by reading the comments it posts on many online gaming venues. Having done my fair share of reading Starfield feedback, I believe I have found one overwhelming reason why Starfield attracted such hate: it attracted the wrong audience.
Before we get into that, it must be understood that Bethesda was riding high because of two of its franchises: The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Both became such beloved examples of the role-playing game ("RPG") genre that Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a game now some fourteen years old, is played to this day by a gaming population that rivals the player counts of brand-new titles. And Fallout has proven so popular that it now enjoys its own fan-acclaimed show on Amazon's Prime Video. In short, Bethesda had become a living legend in the world of RPG design, and with the announcement of Starfield, fan expectations were high, unrealistically so. Worse, in yet another example of a Bethesda communication faux pas, Todd Howard himself added fuel to the hype fire by describing Starfield as "It's like Skyrim in space," which is like a director describing his film as "like Casablanca." In doing so, the studio and its new parent company, Microsoft, made the same mistake Sony and Hello Games had made when promoting No Man's Sky: they were building a house of dynamite and handing their overhyped fandom a match. The pre-launch mythos of Starfield, as with NMS before it, was taking the mien of a religious experience, and no game can survive that (just ask Sean Murray).
But even worse, overblown marketing hype was attracting the wrong audience for Starfield. Here, I need to get a bit pedantic, so please bear with me.
Modern gaming is as complex as any other artistic endeavor, and, as such, there are expectations on the part of the audience when engaging with a certain gaming genre. For example, in cinema, one would not go into a John Huston film expecting a David Lynch experience. That would be daft, as Huston is known for creating films with a classical structure, while Lynch is a freewheeling surrealist. Likewise with gaming. For the purposes of our discussion here, one needs to understand that a fantasy RPG like Skyrim operates very differently from what I will refer to as a "space game." (As with any high-level overview of a topic, I will be painting with a very broad brush for brevity. There is a great deal of nuance and caveats to what I will bluntly argue here.)
Fantasy RPGs have often been described by their fandom as "medieval theme parks." This is quite accurate. As with any Renaissance festival, one buys a ticket to enter a venue packed with medieval-style activities. As soon as the player passes into "the park," they are swamped with "adventurer" activities. Over here, a dragon needs slaying. Over there, a princess needs rescuing. Walk down a path, and one will discover a long-forgotten dungeon, or the ruins of a castle, now in the possession of an evil wizard. That is precisely how Skyrim works. It is a fantasy RPG packed with activities for the brave hero questing for fame and fortune.
But that is not how space games operate. At least not space games that are grounded in realism, what Todd Howard described as Starfield's "Nasa-punk" style. Unlike fantasy games, which, as their taxonomy indicates, are fantastic in presentation (i.e., almost anything goes, as the recent fantasy hit Crimson Desert demonstrates with its eclectic mix of everything from fantasy to steampunk tropes), space games need to present a believable, if distant, portrayal of, as X Minus One terms it, "a million could-be years and a thousand maybe worlds." "Could be" and "maybe" are the operative terms here, as they are what separate science fiction from fantasy. The former deals with the possible, while the latter never was and never could be.
This mismatch of expectations even spilled over into the title's mission structure. Again, in a fantasy setting, one is the hero, the sword-swinging man of the moment out to become the king of the realm. In a grounded space game? You are just not that guy. While it is true that Bethesda incorporated an element of such a figure in the game via its "Starborn" main plot, for the majority of the game, the player is a character performing many jack-of-all-trades tasks, from cataloging the fauna and flora of planets to moving cargo or resolving a bitter family dispute between a father and daughter. For a space gamer, this is expected, as we anticipate a future filled with the mundanities of life that the contemporary world saddles us with as well. It is part of the believable immersion. (This is why many space gamers invest hundreds of hours being space truckers or asteroid miners in games like Eve Online or Elite Dangerous. To have every moment packed with wild action would kill the fun of the desired workaday experience, as inexplicable as that sounds to non-space gamers!) But for the many gaming knights of the sorrowful face that came into Starfield from a fantasy RPG? Boring.
Half the negativity surrounding Starfield comes from gamers who expected a literal Skyrim in space, which is to say a fantasy trope in a science fiction wrapper. Which brings me to my next point...
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The other half of the negativity? Blame Star Wars. (There. I said it. And I would say it again if I had to.)
As this diatribe began in what seems like many eons ago, Starfield is a science fiction game, and one that has more to do with the tales of the golden era of science fiction than with what passes for most science fiction these days. (Again, I am forced to paint with a broad brush here for brevity.) In a world of Star Wars, Starfield is Galaxy Magazine. Here's what I mean:
In a session of Starfield, my character found himself picking through some lockers at an abandoned base on some godforsaken frozen moon in the backwater of an otherwise unremarkable system. In that locker, mixed in with the departed owner's various personal detritus, was a copy of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Comet. My eyes boggled, as they would have in real life. You see, while Du Bois is a famed writer of the African American experience, it isn't well-known that he dabbled in science fiction as well. The Comet is one of his most cherished science fiction stories, and one of the earliest and most significant examples of Afrofuturism and sociological science fiction. And yet, here it was in Starfield. A developer included it in Starfield's library of classic science fiction stories despite surmising that a sizable portion of the game's audience wouldn't appreciate its significance to the genre.
In addition to the many different classic novels, both sci-fi and otherwise, there are many other references to classic science fiction as well. For example, early in the game, the player finds himself in The Well, a subterranean community below New Atlantis, the capital city of the United Colonies. Here, there are multiple allusions to classic science fiction. New Atlantis, for example, is clearly an homage to the futuristic version of San Fransciso that Gene Roddenberry used for the seat of Starfleet Command in his iconic Star Trek television series. The Well itself is a reference to something much older: the workers' quarters from Fritz Lang's German expressionist film Metropolis. The giant waterfall at the heart of The Well is a veiled reference to the (do I need to put a spoiler tag for a nearly century-old film?!) tragic fate of Metropolis's quarters, where the workers are flooded out as part of a nefarious plan.
Starfield is filled with many such references to classic science fiction, from the game's obvious terrormorphs tribute to the xenomorphs of Alien, to Neon's rain-drenched homage to Blade Runner's futuristic Los Angeles. There are space pirates (e.g., the Crimson Fleet) right out of the soft science fiction of 1930s Buck Rogers, and the player even gets to join the rustic Freestar Rangers, something that reminded me of the forgotten 1953 television sci-fi hit, Rocky Jones: Space Ranger. I also came across a sentient NASA space probe, a clear tribute to V'Ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). That is Starfield in a nutshell. Bethesda built a museum of deep, historical science fiction references, but they handed the keys to an audience looking for Star Wars laser swords.
I suspect this will come as a shock, but Star Wars isn't science fiction in the strict sense. Even its creator, George Lucas, conceded that fact when he openly stated that Star Wars isn't science fiction at all; it's space fantasy. That is to say, it is a fairy tale wearing a vacsuit. It relies on magic (The Force), absolute moral binaries (Light vs. Dark), space wizards (Jedi), and a pre-ordained destiny where a farm boy wins the cosmos because of his bloodline. This is a classic fantasy setup. Just with spaceships. To be clear, I am not bashing this beloved franchise that so defined my youth, and can be credited with getting me interested in the broader science fiction genre as a boy. But that also pertains to my central point: Star Wars is, at best, science fiction with training wheels. It was never meant to be the beginning and end, the alpha and omega of an entire genre. Unfortunately, though, for many it became just that.
And Starfield suffered as a result. While Starfield does nod to Star Wars with its Starborn powers, it also attempts to ground such space magic in the concept of the "multiverse" (which is fundamentally just time travel with extra steps, but I will argue that in a different essay!). By framing Starfield's space magic through the lens of a multiverse, Bethesda demonstrated a deep, structural obligation to filter it through a sci-fi framework (theoretical physics and quantum mechanics) rather than just saying "it's a mystical energy field created by all living things." They are trying to ground the magic in a "Nasa-punk" system. Unfortunately, that strategy has become pearls before swine because, when dealing with an audience that has only a superficial understanding of a genre, such clever rhetorical flourishes fall on deaf ears. "Where are the light sabers? Where are the space wizards? Where are the Muppet Show gallery of "aliens"? Why can't I rule the galaxy?" was the only response. Starfield handed gamers a cutter tool, a space suit, a mountain of planetary survey data, and a copy of W.E.B. Du Bois, but many of them didn't see an intellectual science fiction sandbox; they just saw a game that didn't let them be Luke Skywalker.
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I was failing to think up a conclusion for this entirely long-winded and entirely unnecessary rant about Starfield specifically, and the state of science fiction fandom generally, but then the world of social media came to the rescue. While writing this, two comments recently caught my eye.
The first related how a player only enjoyed Starfield after installing a Star Wars mod; before that, he hated it. The second described Starfield as huge but "empty." As someone with over 120 hours on my current character - who hasn't even touched the main quest or the major faction lines because I'm too busy pursuing the endless other activities in-game - I find that "empty" descriptor utterly puzzling. Starfield isn't empty of activities; it is just thin on fantasy heroics.
Honestly, there is nothing I could write that better justifies the arguments I’ve laid out. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare warned that the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. Starfield, with its misunderstood museum of immersive science fiction history, would wholeheartedly agree.
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