I’m very early intoStarfield, which means I’ve only just gotten to the Lodge in New Atlantis and met some of the game’s main characters. After going through the motions and getting through the conversation tree the quest needed me to, I took some time to chat with everybody in the building. While speaking to a nice scientist named Noel, she offered me a tour of Constellation’s headquarters, which I gratefully accepted – I get lost constantly, and a guided jaunt around a new location always helps me get oriented.
She led me out of the main room where we’d been chatting with other members of Constellation, and I followed obediently. I’m still getting to grips with Starfield’s controls, and as I was fumbling with my controller, I accidentally clicked my thumbstick and whacked her in the head with my gun. I expected her to exclaim, or yell at me, but she just stared blankly for a second, then continued her tour without complaint. My partner, who had one eye on the screen, said, “Why did you do that?!”, and I started laughing. It was an accident, of course, but it unlocked a deep, evil urge in me. I whacked her again, and again. Nothing happened.
Related:Starfield Has A Fast Travel Problem
I know people have been playing games like this for ages, shooting ally characters for the fun of it. I’ve been known to empty a case of bullets into an ally while playing multiplayer games in co-op just so they’ll get annoyed at me, but I’ve never been the type to beat the shit out of a friendly NPC in a single-player game. It just seems like a waste of time, since nothing ever happens – they might tell me to stop or stare blankly at me, but that’s the extent of the consequences.
Everything changed when I played Baldur’s Gate 3. Knowing I could murder whole groups of people for fun and the narrative would account for their absence made me feel an unbelievable level of power. I’d never do it, of course – not in my first playthrough, at least – but just the knowledge that I could helped give every attack a degree of importance. I could pick a fight for absolutely no reason, and those people would stay dead. Quests they could have given me would disappear into the ether. I get to strip their bodies for loot and dance over their corpses. The narrative adjusts to my actions, not the other way around, which means I can kill with impunity if the whim strikes me.
Not so in Starfield. Yes, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield are extremely different games, but I’ve found myself missing the process of save scumming, doing something really mean to the character I’m talking to, and reloading to do the normal, morally good, more sane thing instead. I can’t massacre the whole of Constellation, because that would probably mess up the entire game’s storyline, so… I get it. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to do it just to revel in the consequences and the gore. Just to see how my actions change the world around me. Just for funsies.
Next:Starfield Got Too Realistic With Space And Now Everybody’s Disappointed
