CerebralHawk
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We know Starfield is the next game from Bethesda Game Studios, the flagship studio under Zenimax helmed by Todd Howard, but, what do we really know about it? We've seen a logo. I think Howard has said that it will be set in space, though that may just be implicit based on the name and logo.
Bethesda Game Studios' first new IP since they 'hit it big' with Morrowind was Fallout 3 in 2008, and that came with a legion of existing fans to support it, and a ton of existing lore to draw upon. However, they abandoned much of the game's lore, which was established on the west coast of the United States, and made their own story in their stomping grounds just outside of Washington DC, on the east coast. Longtime fans recognized several in-universe brands and factions such as Vault-Tec, Nuka Cola, and the Brotherhood of Steel, but being that cross-country communication did not really exist, Bethesda was clear to write their own interpretations, for example the Brotherhood of Steel being much more benign than in previous iterations (though this was explained, and a rebel offshoot, the Outcasts, were maintaining the tenets established in the older games).
That's all not to say that Bethesda won't create an all-new IP with Starfield, but creating a new IP in space means inventing entire worlds, each with their own cities, races and species, flora and fauna, rules and law, etc. What if they could conveniently skip all that and just focus on making a great game? Thus, I present the theory that Starfield may just be a code name... for a Star Trek or Star Wars game. Consider that making a game set in either of these franchises¹ would not only give Bethesda a plethora of content to draw from, but also a ready batch of fans who have been begging for Bethesda to make a game set in their Star universe of choice. Also note, I began playing with this theory last week, before the Indiana Jones announcement, wherein a Zenimax subsidiary would make an Indiana Jones video game with Todd Howard executive producing. (Todd Howard is a huge Indiana Jones fan.) Also consider that during Skyrim's development, HBO offered Bethesda the chance to make a Game of Thrones game. It would have been easy, at that point, to drop what they were doing with Skyrim into Westeros, but they had already built up the lore, and didn't want to do both, so they forged ahead with Skyrim.
The bar for Star Wars games is very low. Only a few good games have been set in the galaxy far, far away, and only one can really be claimed to be great, and that's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which was set thousands of years before the birth of Anakin Skywalker (later known as Darth Vader), so it was a wholly separate experience from the films. The merely good games include Dark Forces, Force Unleashed and Jedi: Fallen Order. With Star Trek, it's much lower. The original 1966 series, the much-loved The Next Generation, and the fan favorite Deep Space Nine all failed to produce memorable games, the most notable by far being the bridge simulator, a QuickTime-based interactive movie where you can walk around the Enterprise-D from The Next Generation. It wasn't even a game. It was a virtual tour of the sets. The first really good Star Trek game came from Voyager, which was hated by fans for a myriad of reasons, including the captain's refusal to solve the show's primary problem (they were stuck so far from home it would take 75 years at maximum warp to return, and she frequently passed up chances to speed up the journey or to outright jump home) and the deflector dish (a technology to push asteroids and space debris out of the ship's path) as a catch-all deus ex machina. Elite Force used the Quake III engine to make a surprisingly good first-person shooter in the Star Trek universe. Even some of the biggest Voyager haters enjoyed it, because regardless of what that series did wrong, the game was well-made and fun. Sadly, there hasn't been any great Star Trek games, only one that was pretty good, and it was mostly good for the same reason Star Wars: Dark Forces was good: it was based upon an existing popular game (Dark Forces was based on DOOM), so that game had already had most of the bugs ironed out, it was just a matter of re-skinning it to the fictional universe and adding sound effects.
So it wouldn't be hard for Bethesda to make a great Star Wars game, or even a decent Star Trek game, and one would be widely welcomed by their respective communities, and even the other (as there is great crossover between the fandoms, not the rivalry one might expect). Bethesda would have dozens of ready-made worlds and races, and centuries (in Star Trek's case) or millennia (in Star Wars' case) of lore to build upon. As was evident in series such as The Mandalorian (Star Wars series about a member of the bounty hunter race/faction finding a child of a nearly extinct race and protecting it) or Star Trek Discovery, series not centered around the established backbone of the franchises (the Skywalker saga in Star Wars and the voyages of the USS Enterprise family of starships in Star Trek) have a high or in some cases higher chance of success than their mainline counterparts — just look at the cancelled Star Trek: Enterprise or the ill-received Star Wars sequel trilogy. A Bethesda game set in Star Wars centuries after the death of Luke Skywalker, in which the Skywalker saga is all but legend, or a Bethesda game set during any time in the Star Trek universe where a previously unknown ship becomes important somehow (kind of the setup of Star Trek: Discovery, actually).
Imagine — and this isn't even limited to Starfield being a code name — a Bethesda character creator where you create not one character, but a crew of characters, and even choose the design (from a few presets) and name of your ship. Cyberpunk 2077's 5–6 hour prologue will be nothing compared to how long Elder Scrolls and Fallout veterans spend customizing their crew! And honestly, given that possibility, I'd rather choose from races I know, whether it's Klingons and Vulcans, or droids and Wookiees, than having to re-learn a whole new universe of races and their strengths and weaknesses.
¹ Correction; thanks msalaba. I erroneously put factions when I meant franchises. I blame a lack of coffee!
Bethesda Game Studios' first new IP since they 'hit it big' with Morrowind was Fallout 3 in 2008, and that came with a legion of existing fans to support it, and a ton of existing lore to draw upon. However, they abandoned much of the game's lore, which was established on the west coast of the United States, and made their own story in their stomping grounds just outside of Washington DC, on the east coast. Longtime fans recognized several in-universe brands and factions such as Vault-Tec, Nuka Cola, and the Brotherhood of Steel, but being that cross-country communication did not really exist, Bethesda was clear to write their own interpretations, for example the Brotherhood of Steel being much more benign than in previous iterations (though this was explained, and a rebel offshoot, the Outcasts, were maintaining the tenets established in the older games).
That's all not to say that Bethesda won't create an all-new IP with Starfield, but creating a new IP in space means inventing entire worlds, each with their own cities, races and species, flora and fauna, rules and law, etc. What if they could conveniently skip all that and just focus on making a great game? Thus, I present the theory that Starfield may just be a code name... for a Star Trek or Star Wars game. Consider that making a game set in either of these franchises¹ would not only give Bethesda a plethora of content to draw from, but also a ready batch of fans who have been begging for Bethesda to make a game set in their Star universe of choice. Also note, I began playing with this theory last week, before the Indiana Jones announcement, wherein a Zenimax subsidiary would make an Indiana Jones video game with Todd Howard executive producing. (Todd Howard is a huge Indiana Jones fan.) Also consider that during Skyrim's development, HBO offered Bethesda the chance to make a Game of Thrones game. It would have been easy, at that point, to drop what they were doing with Skyrim into Westeros, but they had already built up the lore, and didn't want to do both, so they forged ahead with Skyrim.
The bar for Star Wars games is very low. Only a few good games have been set in the galaxy far, far away, and only one can really be claimed to be great, and that's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which was set thousands of years before the birth of Anakin Skywalker (later known as Darth Vader), so it was a wholly separate experience from the films. The merely good games include Dark Forces, Force Unleashed and Jedi: Fallen Order. With Star Trek, it's much lower. The original 1966 series, the much-loved The Next Generation, and the fan favorite Deep Space Nine all failed to produce memorable games, the most notable by far being the bridge simulator, a QuickTime-based interactive movie where you can walk around the Enterprise-D from The Next Generation. It wasn't even a game. It was a virtual tour of the sets. The first really good Star Trek game came from Voyager, which was hated by fans for a myriad of reasons, including the captain's refusal to solve the show's primary problem (they were stuck so far from home it would take 75 years at maximum warp to return, and she frequently passed up chances to speed up the journey or to outright jump home) and the deflector dish (a technology to push asteroids and space debris out of the ship's path) as a catch-all deus ex machina. Elite Force used the Quake III engine to make a surprisingly good first-person shooter in the Star Trek universe. Even some of the biggest Voyager haters enjoyed it, because regardless of what that series did wrong, the game was well-made and fun. Sadly, there hasn't been any great Star Trek games, only one that was pretty good, and it was mostly good for the same reason Star Wars: Dark Forces was good: it was based upon an existing popular game (Dark Forces was based on DOOM), so that game had already had most of the bugs ironed out, it was just a matter of re-skinning it to the fictional universe and adding sound effects.
So it wouldn't be hard for Bethesda to make a great Star Wars game, or even a decent Star Trek game, and one would be widely welcomed by their respective communities, and even the other (as there is great crossover between the fandoms, not the rivalry one might expect). Bethesda would have dozens of ready-made worlds and races, and centuries (in Star Trek's case) or millennia (in Star Wars' case) of lore to build upon. As was evident in series such as The Mandalorian (Star Wars series about a member of the bounty hunter race/faction finding a child of a nearly extinct race and protecting it) or Star Trek Discovery, series not centered around the established backbone of the franchises (the Skywalker saga in Star Wars and the voyages of the USS Enterprise family of starships in Star Trek) have a high or in some cases higher chance of success than their mainline counterparts — just look at the cancelled Star Trek: Enterprise or the ill-received Star Wars sequel trilogy. A Bethesda game set in Star Wars centuries after the death of Luke Skywalker, in which the Skywalker saga is all but legend, or a Bethesda game set during any time in the Star Trek universe where a previously unknown ship becomes important somehow (kind of the setup of Star Trek: Discovery, actually).
Imagine — and this isn't even limited to Starfield being a code name — a Bethesda character creator where you create not one character, but a crew of characters, and even choose the design (from a few presets) and name of your ship. Cyberpunk 2077's 5–6 hour prologue will be nothing compared to how long Elder Scrolls and Fallout veterans spend customizing their crew! And honestly, given that possibility, I'd rather choose from races I know, whether it's Klingons and Vulcans, or droids and Wookiees, than having to re-learn a whole new universe of races and their strengths and weaknesses.
¹ Correction; thanks msalaba. I erroneously put factions when I meant franchises. I blame a lack of coffee!
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