I’m still fairly early in , as far as I can tell anyway. I’ve collected a couple of Artifacts and put them in the Lodge, and presumably have to chase down more leads from here. According to guides, I’ve already met all the unique story companions I’m going to, though I can still go and recruit some more miscellaneous crew for outposts if I have the cash on hand or happen to encounter them in certain quests. I’ve talked to a lot of people, nosed around in bars for intel, helped out people who 𝄹needed help, and gotten into fights with cops after stealing an expensive steak dinner while I thought nobody could see. I’ve gone through several hours of the game but still haven’t encountered a character that didn’t annoy me.
priority with Starfield didn’t seem to be creating interesting characters as much as it was creating a 🐎ton of systems, most of which annoy me. To be fair, most of the fun I’ve had with previous Bethesda games was instigated by exploration and surprising questlines – none of the companions I’ve ever had in those games were particularly likeable or even interesting. They were just k🔯ind of there to carry equipment and do extra damage to enemies. I shouldn’t have expected more from Starfield, but I still did because it’s 2023 and, you know. Characters matter and all that.
I’ve seen that Starfield’s Constellation companions are interesting in theory but boring in practice. Barrett has some attitude and is known as a bit of a rabble-rouser, always getting into scrapes, Sam is a single father and a nepo baby who hates his dad, and Sarah is… the leader with seemingly few other distinctive qualities. Andreja is mildly interesting just because she’s kind of mean and aloof, which makes me want to know what exactly her damn problem is. But in practice, none of these characters add anything to your game, because their personalities have very little to do with the choices you make or the way you play. It’s especially painful coming from , where your companions are everything.
The people you meet on your journey are no better. Everyone feels like a walking trope, completely flattened to avoid having any kind of nuance. Some of them have interesting backstories, but the majority of them are dead-eyed zombies with the most boring barks imaginable to man. I find myself endeared to a chirpy janitor iꦜn New Atlantis, and then she has absolutely nothing interesting to say after the initial quest I do for her. My interest﷽ is piqued by a grumpy electronic store owner in The Well, and then he returns to being a whole lot of nothing.
The problem is not really that not every character is interesting, but that the dialogue is so bad. Bethesda is known for its NPCs that spou🔴t absolutely irrelevant nonsense when you interact with them – you know, arrow to the knee – but I thought they would have at least tried a little harder, considering it’s so absurd that Bethesda dialogue has become a total meme. Every character vomits exposition at my feet in the least subtle way possible, and I really have to ask, at this point in gaming, is this really what we want from our hugest, biggest-budget games? Even conversations with your companions are intolerably boring and shallow. At this point, the most I can ask them is about their history and hobbies, which, again, after Baldur’s Gate 3, feels extremely shitty.
It’s like I&rs🌼quo;m being followed around by a bunch of robots instead of characters I can interact with organically. There’s no point in interacting with them unless they indicate they want to talk to me, and the whole thing is boring me. Once again, I’m searching for reasons to keep playing Starfield and coming up short. If it’s 🔯not the characters that get me, nor the systems, nor the story, what could it be?