Into the Void: A Starfield Design Deconstruction

Let me first start with a disclaimer. As a game developer, I know what it’s like to put your heart into something only to have it get torn apart by some stranger on the internet. Unsolicited criticism and feedback are rarely well received.

Yet I also know that sometimes critique, holistic and metered, is exactly what is needed. I frame the following as such, this is critique with the aim to improve and elevate. As creator of Advent Horizon, I am intimately familiar with writing for the Sci-Fi genre. And I am deeply aware of the development challenges of spacefaring games, as a senior producer on Star Citizen. But at the end of the day, that does not change the fact that Starfield left me insulted, confused, and deeply disappointed. If I had one thing to say to Todd Howard and Emil Pagliarulo:

I could do better.

With more than 200 hundred hours into the title, it is clear to me where Starfield both excels and flounders. The improvements made to the engine deliver a beautiful experience, and the hard work of the engineers and artists shows. Yet, this is let down largely by a weak and inconsistent design direction.

My analysis of the system design and design philosophy represent the largest body of my critique, and I think you will see why. Starfield shares much of its DNA with Fallout 76 – and not in a good way. Much like in 76, a game I also have hundreds of hours in, progression and crafting systems are essential and essentially boring parts of the core loop. Forcing players to engage is a meaningless activity in hopes of upgrading but completely meaningless once the next better piece of equipment drops. In many ways, the crafting experience seems like a punishment for players who don’t follow shooter-looter behaviors. This holds true for several systems that arise from the 76 inspired design and engine. Base building, economy, and travel all feel directly related to the worse aspects of Fallout 76, not the best.

With crafting, players should have been able to craft weapons based on formats and blueprints, and upgrade weapons through the respective ranks up to advanced. Outside this loop, the player should have had a separate crafting tree to add rare, epic, and legendary components to weapons by finding and researching those traits. Finally, naming a weapon and using the weapon during key events should unlock the ability to change a weapon’s status to Unique.

With base building, what was needed more than anything else was a research and development advantage for crafting, ship parts/components, and exploration. Having a homebase and using that as a launch pad to venture into the stars is pivotal. Instead, we get a Fallout 4 inspired settlement network with resource gathering that is completely divorced from every other aspect of the game, generating resources with no use and no economic value because all the merchants are so poor. Instead, we should have been able to set up a trade organization that allowed us to generate credits from bases and outposts, and a storyline that follows our entrepreneurial ventures. The shipment missions were not lucrative enough to warrant a base network focused on resource gathering.

To me, bases should have been a much bigger, or much smaller component. Without other core design changes, I would have cut it entirely and focused on ships or added space stations.

I won’t do Starfield a disservice by making comparisons. However, when it comes to procedural generation of planets and content, the design philosophy fails the game entirely. The segregation of space and planetside robs the experience of diegetic immersion. Ironically similar titles, while objectively much smaller, feels much bigger and more alive - despite many design similarities regarding planets, space, travel, and exploration. With some contemporaries, the cinematic approach limited the explorable world but made its presence felt with the gravity of the player’s choices. Sadly, in Starfield beyond the unchanging Settled Systems, the small landing sites coupled with the lack of ability to build infrastructure made the base building feel gutted, and planets feel tiny and empty. With the powerful outpost building systems, why were there never any procedurally generated outposts and encampments? Instead, we were treated to the same science outpost, mining outpost, and industrial facility a hundred times and a hundred different planets. Complete with the same diegetic lore on each of the terminals.

This alone was one of the worst experiences in the game. Finding an abandoned outpost and being so excited to learn what happened there through the in-game lore only to discover it was a copy of an outpost I had delved into hours earlier was a crushing disappointment.

With the poorly delivered procedural content, the lack of free flight became more and more infuriating as the hours racked on. What I love about Bethesda RPGs is picking a direction, heading out, and finding what adventures awaited me. That, to me, is the heart of a Bethesda RPG. One that Fallout 76 seemed to hate, and Starfield seems to want to eliminate. This conflict is most evident in Skyrim, where many aspects of the narrative design seem to be at odds with the open world, yet it is the open world that allows Skyrim to captivate audiences to this day.

Punishing open world exploration was a consistent theme in the design. However, to me, it felt like design pillars shifted mid development for reasons, because while weight seems incredibly important in ships and storage, it has no actual bearing, beyond simply being arbitrarily limited by your ship. At some point O2 became the primary resource I was managing, given that I was carrying 20k in weight simply because storage was so limited.

I love hard Sci-Fi, and using weight as a metric for fuel costs in a game could be an excellent control metric for sinks and faucets in a game economy (where players spend and earn in game currencies and resources). Given the weight limits in place, I would have added such a fuel system, meaning weight costs fuel, and fuel needs to be mined or purchased. Instantly outposts with unlimited storage and fuel generating capacity become an important aspect of exploration and progression. It seems to me, this may have been the intent, but the design philosophy reared its ugly head, and ruined this.

This brings me to another point regarding space, travel, and time. Space is BIG. Really Big. Starfield does capture that to some extent, meaning while in your ship free flying around a solar system is possible if extremely time consuming. And here again this design philosophy ruined an opportunity. Did you know your ship’s break thrusters slow you down for no reason after you accelerate? Despite the insipid travel system in the game, travelling between planets and stars taking a few minutes is fine, so long as there are activities and mini loops to engage with on your ship. Your huge, beautiful ship that you spent tens of hours building and customizing.

In Starfield, 1 hour UT in game is 1 minute in real time. Give travel a number of UT hours players must spend aboard their ships. Players should have been treated to a couple minute travel sequence wherein they need to maintain the ship or have time to go craft and research or scan. Use those times to load the huge complete planets or spawn random encounters. Give players a reason to sleep on their ship between worlds and maybe wake them up halfway because of an event. Travel in Starfield is simplistic, but not simple.

Speaking of travel, it seems such a small complaint, but the constant closely clustered asteroid fields near planets were an insipid feature and were an infuriating aspect of traveling. Asteroid fields are not like that, the fields in the game were awful to navigate, and added nothing. Inclusion of almost every jump point entry spawn felt like advice from someone that “space is big and boring; add rocks!” in the same vein as people who advise authors to never use “said” – that’s dumb.

Beyond the above, the more technical aspects of the game’s system design land beautifully. The physics, gravity and motion systems were smooth. The boarding mechanism was amazingly fun, and the ship piloting and dog fighting were much better than I expected. The Bethesda dialogue delivered what I love about it, although I would have more clearly defined the role-playing archetypes for each dialogue option – as can be found in the persuasion trees.

To wit, I actively did not enjoy the persuasion system. Unlike every other system, persuasion was random chance with little or no skill-based mechanism. Even combat, which included randomized accuracies, felt like a system that could be controlled, as my 54k headshot count can attest to. But not persuasions (and diplomacy, intimidation, etc.) rather, you had some random choices that may or may not fit the dialogue tree and move people. This was a poor choice in design, and a strong break point to disconnect from the game.

Starfield deserved a robust system using 3 to 5 intellectual and emotional triggers. Each persuadable NPC would have sat on a matrix of emotional, rational, moral and ethical values. Persuasion and its child skills would have all been about getting their indicator into the NPC’s sweet spot based on that character’s personality. Persuasion would become a fun mini-game of reading your target, understanding their values, and manipulating them appropriately. Instead we got... random chance.

The UI and UX equally seemed preoccupied with a simplistic design, but not one that fit the world or lore. The overall UI was… not stellar. Ofcourse, UI/UX has always been a challenge for Bethesda, and is always the first thing that gets a mod improvement. Yet Skyrim showed huge improvement over previous titles, with a diegetic design around the culture and values of the region. While Fallout 4’s UI was cluttered, it was part of the lore. In 76 the UI/UX plumets, becoming somehow far worse than previous titles – and culminating in Starfield where the UI shows everything the player does not need to know, and nothing they do.

UX, including keyboard and controller schema, leave much to be desired, abundant hold (button (this) to interact) elements leave regular tap button (this) to get effect inputs lost as that ere two tenths of a millisecond too long.

That was not the only thing that felt out of place in Starfield. One thing that stood out to me was the art direction painting such a different picture than the narrative design. The art direction made every faction seem brilliantly unique, a culture born from centuries of trials and tribulations among the stars. Each weapon manufacturer and ship designer had their aesthetic, their alliances, and their competitors, all visible just from the designs. Yet the story painted no such picture. Nothing about the diaspora, the cultural contributions to the factions, the values and metrics of each power structure.

This brings us to the narrative. Perhaps this is the most tragic failing of Starfield’s design direction; in truth the overall narrative and abysmal worldbuilding disappoints the game’s superb character writing. Creationism and anti-intellectualism suffuse a story of scientists and explorers, where in the only answer to the unknown is, here is the answer it must be space-gods. Subtext of intelligent design and theism are rife within a story that should have explored curiosity, doubt, meaning, and humanity’s purpose.

I would have told a very different story given all same the core elements. Perhaps I will write one for Advent Horizon. A story of humanity’s triumph over disaster, of their resolute ability to topple alien mytho-singularism, and an advent of great minds overcoming greater obstacles. While I adore the multiversal narrative explanation of the “new game +” feature, the result was disappointing, myopic, and intellectually dishonest. The story seemed to narratively punish players for exploring these alternate universes, not reward curiosity, critical thinking, and careful observation.

Which is ironic, because those are the elements of a great science fiction story. What separates science fiction from fantasy is not spaceships and laser beams, but skepticism, reason, and discovery. All the things that Starfield’s narrative does without. Or more accurately, it actively devalues, dismisses, and ridicules. Starfield’s is a story that seems to hate science, human progress, and reason. The incredible voice talent lends soul to writing that paints these admirable qualities as laughable and comedic. Faith, familial bonds, and religious apologism are painted as the only virtues.

I won’t lie, as a writer and designer this was beyond the pale for me. The brilliant character writing and voice talent made me deeply despise the Constellation cadre as a scientist and engineer. I felt like I was being presented with caricatures of scientists as imagined by simpletons. The time I spent in the aerospace industry, in stellar computation, and in research science was presented as the amoral pursuit of ego whereas theistic simplicity was lauded as excelsior thinking. The House of Enlightenment was like someone who has never met an atheist use r/atheism as a definition of non-believers. It was insulting.

Thus, I am left bitter. I don’t think Starfield is a bad game, and it will obviously make money, but the truth is that Starfield is a game with more of Bethesda’s weaknesses, and fewer of their strengths. With the limits of the budget and engine, I know I could do better. And that is perhaps what frustrates me the most.