There’s the Crimson Fleet, a band of criminals that doesn’t follow the rules set down by the UCSEC, which polices the Settled Systems. Take the factions introduced so far in the 15-minute Starfield presentation. Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks I think that one of the unstated design goals of Starfield is to bring us all down a peg. His quote boils down fairly simply in the language of the present day: Humanity ain’t seen shit, but we keep on acting like we know it all anyway. France was, above all else it seems, a skeptic. There is a lot more left to discover than what we have yet perceived with our eyes, or our most fabulous telescopic and radiographic instruments. If the universe is so large as described above, man has yet to grok even a tiny fraction of it. I don’t read this as haughty or high-minded. The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it. And the Earth, though grown smaller than an atom, would be watered with tears and blood just as copiously as it is to-day. The pole-star, included together with ourselves in the nut, would still take fifty years to transmit its light to us as before. If it were suddenly reduced to the dimensions of a hazel-nut, all things keeping their relative proportions, we should know nothing of the change. In themselves things are neither great nor small, and when we say the Universe is vast we speak purely from a human standpoint. Nor is there anything absurd in supposing that centuries of thought and intelligence may live and die before us in the space of a minute of time, in the confines of an atom of matter. The English translation, achieved here by Alfred Allinson, feels like it could easily have been the inspiration for the end of Men in Black. His Le Jardin d’Épicure ( The Garden of Epicurus) begins with a few paragraphs that set the tone for the ponderings that follow, all of which make careful reference of what we now consider to be fairly modern scientific concepts - the speed of light, the spectral analysis of distant stars, and the scale and vastness of the universe itself. The trailer opens on a quote from Anatole France, a French journalist, novelist, and poet. Our society seems to have lost a bit of its sense of wonder since the Space Shuttle was retired, and Starfield could be a kind of balm for our jaded outlook on life, the universe, and everything around us. If I’m picking up what Todd Howard and company are laying down, Starfield is as much an ambitious single-player video game as it is a commentary on the state of modern space exploration. But there’s one part of Sunday’s presentation that really struck a chord with me: The narrative attached to the game’s main quest line seems bold, if not downright inspiring. But what do you expect from their first new IP in more than 20 years? However, more bullet points rarely add up to more quality, and I too wonder if 1,000 planets simply means 1,000 places in which to get lost and bored. Bethesda may be overreaching a bit this time. Still others have gently warned that getting spaceship combat dialed in is as much an art as it is a science, as evidenced by the Star Citizen projects’ many, many revisions thus far. Some remain unimpressed with its base building and resource gathering, things that other games have done much more capably than Fallout 4. Many critics have noted that its cast of characters looks like the same dead-eyed creeps that shipped with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. The reveal of Starfield, the jewel in the crown of Xbox Game Studios’ 12-month release calendar, fell a bit flat during this weekend’s Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase.
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