GLEN WELDON, HOST:
Starfield is one of the biggest and most anticipated video game releases of the year. It is a massive open world game set in humanity's future when we've settled on star systems throughout the galaxy. There's over 1,000 planets to explore, multiple factions to join, enemies to combat, companions to flirt with, spaceships to pilot and quests to go on. But does the game live up to the advance hype? I'm Glen Weldon, and today we're talking about Starfield on POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR.
Joining me today is one of the hosts of a little startup show called NPR's All Things Considered and the Consider This podcast, Juana Summers. Hey, Juana.
JUANA SUMMERS, BYLINE: Hey, Glen.
WELDON: Welcome. Welcome. Also with us is Swapna Krishna. She's a freelance space and science writer and also wrote a great review of Starfield for the NPR website. Welcome to the show, Swapna.
SWAPNA KRISHNA: Thank you.
WELDON: Let's get into it. So Starfield is an open world - I guess we should say open worlds - role playing game from the company known for making them, Bethesda Game Studios. They're the creators of such hugely popular games as Fallout and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In Starfield, your character comes outfitted with certain characteristics you choose before playing and quickly gets caught up in the search for mysterious alien artifacts strewn across the galaxy. As you search for these artifacts and explore their origins, you go about your life in the 24th century, hopping from planet to planet, earning credits, either avoiding violent conflict or diving headfirst into it. You can be a space cop or a space pirate. You can smuggle contraband or go on missions of mercy. It's all up to you, and the choices you make matter. They change the game in ways big and small.
There's a lot riding on Starfield for Bethesda. It's a massive game and the company's first one set in an entirely new universe in 25 years. It's also the first major exclusive for the Xbox since Microsoft purchased Bethesda's parent company in 2021. Sales have been great, but reviews have been mixed, praising the game's scope and ambition but expressing some frustration with the story and gameplay. And we'll be talking about some of those details. If you want to go in fully unspoiled, maybe save it for after you've played a bit. Starfield is available now for Xbox Series S and X and for the PC. Juana, kick us off. What do you think?
SUMMERS: I mean, I think for me, the biggest thing that excited me about Starfield when I started hearing all of the hype - and, I mean, we should just point out this game has been in development and kind of an inkling in the mind of Bethesda's Todd Howard for a decade...
WELDON: Yep.
SUMMERS: ...Was the idea of creating this super-expansive world. I am not a person who has played a ton of Bethesda games before, but for me, that idea of ambitious storytelling, of creating this open world and against the palette of space, which is so infinite, I found super attractive. The thing that I kept telling people when I first picked up the game was that it is the most beautiful video game I've ever played. Like, it is stunning. It takes you there. It's easy to get lost. Some of the mechanics, though, were a little bit challenging for me as a person who does not play this type of game very often. So like you said, Glen, a little bit of a mixed bag. But generally - I don't know. I feel like I drank the Kool-Aid.
WELDON: OK. Kool-Aid drinker. Swapna, How about you?
KRISHNA: Yeah, I have a love-hate relationship with this game. I have played Bethesda games. I've played Skyrim. I've played a little bit of Fallout. And so this is very much a Bethesda game. Like, if you know what a Bethesda RPG is, then you know exactly the fundamental mechanics of this game. For me, I absolutely loved a lot of what Juana was saying about the beauty of the game, the scope of it. And as a space and science journalist who has this, like, diehard love of NASA, of space history, there's a real very cool thread of that running through the game that I absolutely loved, an homage to this old space stuff that, like, really made my heart flutter. But also, I am just tired. This game, just the scope of it makes me so - just, like, you land in a new settlement. And you're either going to feel, like, really excited for everything to explore or, like, oh, my God, how many people do I have to talk to..
WELDON: Exactly.
KRISHNA: ...To, like, figure out the quests? This is the next, like, four hours of my life. So a little bit of a love-hate relationship here.
WELDON: Yeah. I get that. I totally get what both of you are saying about the ambition, about the scope but also about the mechanics. I do enjoy this game. I have sunk 72 hours into it. I have gotten married. I have got the, quote-unquote, "best ship" in the game. I was testing out one aspect of the game which we might talk to, one of the powers you get eventually, just on a street. And it caused some damage, and I was arrested. And suddenly, now I'm an undercover pirate.
So there is a disconnect, though, between the promise of this game and its execution. Yes. As you both said, it's about exploration. It's about just pointing your spaceship at a distant star and then setting down on a planet. Limitless possibility.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
WELDON: Again and again for me, though, the limitless possibility of the game became pointing your ship at a distant star, navigating a series of menus involving fuel consumption and landing sites. And then when you land on this planet, this brand-new planet, you are trekking across barren landscapes for thousands of meters. And we should say, just so people know, you do have to trek in this game. There are no vehicles. There are no space horses. There are no Tauntauns. So the creators have said that's very intentional. They want you to feel the immensity. They want you to get completely, you know, enveloped and enraptured and experience that. And hey, I did. But, you know, sometimes the mysterious object I would find on my map turned out to be an ice crystal. That's hard to - it was hard to justify the journey. But it's about the journey, right?
SUMMERS: Yeah. I mean, it's a game about the journey. It's a game about choices. But I think that the thing you mentioned, Glen, that really jumped out to me was the idea of having to navigate through these endless menus to make those choices or to engage in combat or to do the thing that you need to do to fulfill a quest. That's the thing that kind of killed parts of the immersion for me. Like, if you're actually immersing yourself in this kind of space epic adventure galaxy, you're not going to have to, like, toggle out to go click on a menu. And that just - some of that did kill it for me. I find the game satisfying. I'm still playing. I have not sunk 72 hours into it quite yet. That definitely, I think, made the experience a little less rich than I think it could have been if Bethesda had made some different choices about how to put it together.
WELDON: Swapna, let me ask you a question real quick. So this appeals to you, right? Because Lord knows it's accurate, because in truth, space exploration isn't just pointing your ship at a distant star and steering to it. It's all about technical specs. It's all about navigating menus. Right? So there is some verisimilitude here, at least some.
KRISHNA: Here's the thing. Space exploration is actually pretty boring.
WELDON: (Laughter).
KRISHNA: You don't know what you're going to find. In sci-fi, it sounds really cool because you always find something.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
KRISHNA: At the end of whatever journey you're on, you always find something because that's sci-fi. But actual space exploration is kind of boring. If you think about, like, rovers on Mars, you know, it's all robotic, but, like, it's nine months to get to the red planet. And then they're, like, driving around looking at rocks. I find it super exciting because they're rocks on another planet. But for most people - one of the questions I get so much about this new space telescope, JWC, finding all these elements and stuff in exoplanet atmospheres is, like, does this matter? Well, yeah, but, you know, no. Like. It's not significant in the way people want it to be significant. It matters because it's a cool new discovery that can further our knowledge and understanding. But space exploration's actually - it's very incremental. It's boring. So in some ways, I think this captures that really, really well. But also, that's not how you necessarily want to spend your time in a game.
WELDON: Well, Juana, what do you think about that? I mean, sometimes when I was scanning an element, I was like, why am I scanning this element? What is this? What - so, oh, lead. I have found lead.
SUMMERS: OK. I have to confess. Maybe I'm a nerd. I don't - no, I definitely am a nerd. I actually really enjoyed that part of the game.
WELDON: OK.
SUMMERS: The going through, the cataloging, the scanning, the figure out - what is out there? Just because I think it's what you were talking about. I think it's that promise of not knowing what you're going to find and what could be out there. And sometimes it's lead, but sometimes it's something you've never seen before. So I did find that part of the game attractive. And I think it's also just because I really appreciated, like, the fine kind of attention to detail that those kinds of scans show that, like, they've built this entire new IP, the first one in 25 years, like you mentioned, Glen, and they've thought it down to that small of a detail. So, like, as a person who tells stories for a living, that part of it really worked really well for me, even if it was a little tedious and there was like four hours of doing that scanning and cataloging and scanning and cataloging and so on.
WELDON: Well, that's the thing, because even though this is a brand-new world or universe, basically, solar system anyway or galaxy I suppose, in execution, this game is built on the same engine that Fallout and Skyrim were built on. So the actual interface, the interaction you have with other characters and enemies feels very familiar if you've played a lot of Bethesda games. But that's a two-edged sword, right? Because while it's nice to kind of get your head around the interface and know the infrastructure of a game, that's good because theoretically you don't spend a lot of time flailing about at the beginning. But ultimately, this felt so familiar that I don't know if it's the game changer it wants to be. Apart from the scope, this doesn't feel like we're at the bleeding edge of gaming, but maybe it doesn't need to be. What do you guys think?
KRISHNA: I agree. I found aspects of it tedious. As a person who goes around and picks up everything I can, Bethesda's inventory systems drive me up a wall because I have like 85 foam cups.
WELDON: Yeah.
KRISHNA: I'm, like, tiptoeing because I have so much stuff. And I'm like, I just need to unload all this. And the game is not stingy with, like, credits, money.
WELDON: No, that's true.
KRISHNA: You accumulate stuff fast. But always, when I play a Bethesda game, I have to, like, retrain my mind to be like, you don't need to pick up everything you see. You don't need to pick up every weapon you see. This is a game that I would argue - Xbox needs a hit.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
KRISHNA: And this is a game that kind of needs to be a hit. And is that the best way if you're trying to appeal to a mass audience, which I would argue this game is, like having these, like, very intricate and frustrating for somebody, a self-professed casual gamer, inventory system? Is that smart for a game like this? That, I mean, that would be my question.
SUMMERS: I think for me, as someone who plays a good number of video games but has not played a ton of Bethesda games, I didn't actually find it super daunting or frustrating the way I know that a lot of reviewers and a lot of people who have played this game did. I found it clunky, but I didn't find it super frustrating.
WELDON: Yeah.
SUMMERS: But I think the thing that really jumps out at me here is the idea that Xbox really needed a hit here. And when our team at All Things Considered talked to Todd Howard about this - he's the Bethesda director. And he even said himself, you know, he felt pressure that they needed to deliver a game for Microsoft after this acquisition for Xbox. And then it led to a series of questions about like, OK, so where does that pressure show up? And perhaps this is one example of where that bind. shows for them.
WELDON: That's interesting because when I was encountering those old familiar Bethesda dialogue trees - and for listeners, a dialogue tree, as you speak to a character, the character speaks to you. And you're given an options of what to say back. It's Bethesda, right? So the options you're given, you can either be a completely milquetoast goody two shoes try-hard or a complete A-hole. There's not a lot of daylight between those options often. I mean, I did not exactly spread my wings when I created my character. I played as a bald, beardy, introverted, atheist, goody two shoes. There were so many times when I wanted to pick the option where you just tell somebody to go pound space sand, buddy. I just want my money. I never played like that. How did you guys play?
KRISHNA: I'm similar. It gives me anxiety to play, like, as an A-hole. It just - it gives me...
WELDON: Yeah, right?
KRISHNA: I get really anxious. And so I always play as the goody two shoes. And I - it annoys me because I want there to be a little more options.
WELDON: Exactly.
KRISHNA: I want there to be a little more subtlety. I want there to be a little more than like flirt, flirt, flirt, OK, let's get married.
WELDON: (Laughter) Yeah.
KRISHNA: Like, I want a little more of the in-between. And I feel like we should be at the point where that is possible and an option in, like, a game like this, and it's not. And that is a little bit frustrating.
SUMMERS: Yeah. I mean, I played kind of some of the same way. I tried to play, like, as close to a pacifist as one can possibly be in a game like this...
WELDON: Sure.
SUMMERS: ...And really trying to steer myself towards the exploration, using-my-powers-for-good-not-for-evil mode as I could, which for anyone who knows me knows that is incredibly on brand.
WELDON: (Laughter). How were you guys at the combat? There's two kinds of combat here. There's the ground combat where you make your way through some incredibly weirdly designed space outposts, knocking off enemies. The architecture in the future is not intuitive, let me just put it that way. There's no feng shui in the future. Again and again, I found myself thinking, why put a staircase here? And then you often have to retrace your steps while things are blowing up and robots are coming after you. So ground combat for me involved burning through lots and lots of ammo and medkits. I eventually did get the hang of it. How was it for you guys?
KRISHNA: I mean, I'm a self-professed casual gamer. I play on easy. I started out on easy, drop down to very easy pretty fast.
WELDON: (Laughter).
KRISHNA: It gave me a chance to get - really get a sense of those mechanics. And then I stepped it back up after a while because it was a little too easy.
WELDON: Right.
KRISHNA: I think that's great for people who don't really like mastering combat. Like, I think it's great that you can make it that easy. It felt pretty straightforward in terms of the combat. I did like the ship combat and the being able to dial up your shields, dial down your weapons' power and kind of balance your engines and like, OK, I'm going to go - I want to get away from these people really fast. I really did actually like that. And I'm not somebody who usually loves piloting a ship in a game. So I will say, like, that - I was impressed with that.
WELDON: Yeah. What you're talking about there is the ship combat, the space combat where you can pilot your ship and kind of determine your systems and how much power your shields have and how much power your weapons have. What did you think, Juana?
SUMMERS: Oh, that was the part that drove me absolutely crazy during this entire game. I really enjoyed the ground combat. I found that very intuitive compared to other games that I had played. Once I got the weapons that I liked, it turns out I'm a pretty good sniper if anybody would care to know.
WELDON: Good to know.
SUMMERS: The ship combat, however, I did not find intuitive at all. I felt, like, especially in the early days of playing this game before I got a sense for it, I was constantly spinning myself up and down. I had trouble tracking the ships that I was supposed to battle. Like, you've got to figure it all out for yourself. No one is holding your hands to figure out how to deal with these mechanisms. And that just took me - I mean, playing it early without the benefit of having other people to talk to who were also playing it, it just took me too long. And frankly, it felt really - it was beautiful, but I was also really frustrated until I could figure out, OK, this is what I need to do to lock on. This is the button I need to hit to shoot missiles. This is what I need to do to jump quickly. It did not work for me.
WELDON: That is - you know what I missed in this game is something that all other games have that I never use but I really needed here, which was a menu system of some kind which would just go over the basics, just the tutorial, right?
SUMMERS: Yes.
WELDON: There is so much to do. I didn't always know why something was worth doing, if that makes sense.
SUMMERS: Absolutely.
WELDON: Can we talk about the world of this game and the story? The world of the game is not the story of the game, right? The world is just the setting. And as impressive as this setting is, the story itself, I mean, it is doing - the setting is doing what science fiction does. It comments on our current situation. There are certainly have and have-nots in this universe. There are class divides. There are people who are exploiting and people who are exploited.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
WELDON: The story, however, doesn't stray too far from a chosen one magic power storyline where you know you are somehow so important to the whole of humanity stuff. Juana, what did you make of that?
SUMMERS: I mean, I think for me, as I mentioned earlier, we sat down with some of the folks from Bethesda and talked about some of these big existential questions that the game teases out about, where does the universe come from? What is our place in it? What control do you have over your own destiny? How do you feel about the choices that you're making in your life? And that's part of the game that really did work well for me. Those kind of things are things that I'm just attracted to in other forms of creative work and books and movies and the music I listen to. So I really enjoyed that.
It is not necessarily - like, look. I don't think that the main quest and the way that you experience it, it's not the most original story of all time, but I did find it compelling. And I especially found some of the details and the ways in which they encourage you as the player to grapple with those existential questions I thought was really interesting. One of the things I loved also was the way they handled religion in this game, which I don't know if you want to get into later, but that was one of my favorite things here.
WELDON: Sure.
KRISHNA: I agree in that I didn't think it was handled very originally. I will say I didn't find it so compelling. I couldn't help in my head but compare it all the time to the story of Mass Effect. If I had to pick, like, my favorite video game, like, franchise of all time, it's the Mass Effect trilogy. And I feel like that they did the chosen one story a little bit so well in that, and I don't feel this was as well done. And I wasn't driven to follow the course of the story. I played the game a little more broadly versus, like, zeroing in on the story and figuring out where it went because it just didn't really compel me. And that's rare for my type of way I usually play games.
WELDON: Well, let me ask you both. There is in this game a mechanic that kind of comes in a little bit later where you get basically, for lack of a better term, let's call them magic powers. Swapna, I gather that for your hard science brain, that kind of hand-waving - literally hand-waving because you do wave your hands - in this game, kind of felt like it was not living up to the promise it made.
KRISHNA: Yes. That takes it out of sci-fi for me and puts it in space opera.
WELDON: Yeah.
KRISHNA: And that's fine. That's fine. Like, I love "Star Wars," but "Star Wars" is not science fiction. It's fantasy set in space. Setting something in space doesn't make it sci-fi. Sci-fi is that there's always a scientific explanation. And yeah, you know, it's alien stuff. I get it. But it's also - it felt like magic and didn't love that.
WELDON: Juana, how about that magic spirituality, religion aspect of the game? Did it appeal to you?
SUMMERS: So interestingly, I found personally it did appeal to me. I do not have a particularly hard science brain. I found it fun, though not necessarily believable. Like, I understand that, Like, that is not a thing that is likely to happen no matter where, like, our society goes with space exploration. That's not a thing. But what I find interesting about what didn't appeal to it for Swapna is this is exactly what the Bethesda guys were telling us they didn't want to have happen, right? The art director, Istvan Pely, literally told us that science fiction without rules becomes fantasy, and they wanted this game to feel believable. And so it sounds like by that virtue, perhaps for some people, they didn't live up to the task there. They didn't want this to feel completely out of this world and extraterrestrial and unbelievable. I thought it was fun but perhaps not believable, if that makes any sense.
WELDON: Yeah. For me, I love that kind of stuff. Give me space wizards with laser swords. Love it. I don't like the hard, like, the hard sci-fi stuff. So I was really looking forward to it as soon as that mechanic revealed itself. I didn't end up using it that much though, because the actual powers you get are pretty weak sauce. I mean, like, they're gravity. You can make a rock float. And that's, like, not - it doesn't come up for me very much in the game. So yeah, that was, that was an interesting kind of Catch-22 there. So, Juana, you mentioned the religion aspect of this game. You can play as an atheist. You can play as somebody who believes that God is out there waiting for us in the stars. What did you do, and what do you think of the religious aspect of this game?
SUMMERS: So I really love this. For people who don't know, I grew up in the church and went to a religiously educated school, so I'm always interested in how works of fiction of any kind approach religion. And this game kind of creates those - these two religions, one of which believes that space travel can bring you closer to God. And one of the details I love about it is the fact that there's actually fairly deep doctrine in this game that's created. And one of the coolest details that I picked up from our trip to Bethesda is the fact that they actually had a former game designer who was studying to be a Jesuit priest write some of the doctrine for the Sanctum Universum to make the theological writing feel fleshed out and interesting. So when I kind of started going down that path, that felt really rich and rewarding to me and, like, a good example of how you can tell this kind of story with a lot of depth. And I don't know, at least for me and the games that I've played, I've never really played a game that has explored religion in that way before. It really worked for me.
KRISHNA: I did not play either of the religion, you know, subplots. But that being said, I engaged with the characters. I just didn't commit to anything. And I'm really glad that exists in a video game because like Juana said, like, that is not something that gets explored, especially in sci-fi. Like, especially in sci-fi video games, a lot of the religious people seem kind of pushed to the side as maybe a little kooky. And I'm really glad that it took it seriously because it gives people who are religious a chance to be seen in the future. And I think that's really cool.
WELDON: Yeah. What I liked about the way this game treated atheism is that it - the characters I met who were part of the - what's called the Enlightened, which sounds a little condescending, but that's atheists for you. They're altruists, basically. They seek to help others. You don't often see that side depicted. I also liked the fact that while The Sanctum Universum had, like, these amazing, very fancy buildings and royal robes and everything, the atheists, their whole office was in a subbasement of a subbasement and they - visible ductwork. And I thought, yeah, that checks out.
Well, I mean, we're grappling with this game, right? I think we all really like it. We're all, you know, investing serious time and effort into it. We have our caveats. And so that's, of course, what we talked about, what we focused on here. But no, this is a really interesting, very ambitious game that I think is worth your time.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
WELDON: Well, we want to know what you think about Starfield. Find us at facebook.com/pchh. That brings us to the end of our show. Juana Summers, Swapna Krishna, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to PCHH.
SUMMERS: Thank you.
KRISHNA: Thank you.
WELDON: Won't be the last time. This episode was produced by Hafsa Fathima and edited by Mike Katzif. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy. And Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon. And we'll see you all tomorrow.
Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7r7zRZ6arn1%2Bpv6K60pypoqikqHxyfZhwcG5sYWyF