Sci Fi

At the outset, I must admit that I had very high expectations of this game; probably unrealistic and unfair expectations. That said, I can’t help but feel disappointed after having put about 60 hours into the game. My opinion of the game may not comport with broader criticisms; I haven’t checked. But, as you already know, my opinions don’t have to be yours.

For background: I completed the main story, the companion missions for several of the characters, the Freestar Ranger questline and the Vanguard questline. I spent an inordinate amount of time taking bounty missions to neutralize Crimson Fleet ships or Ecliptic Mercenaries so that I could level up.

That last part was, perhaps, one of the most frustrating parts of the game. Character progression is locked between 82 different skills, each with four levels. Some of these skills–many of the combat ones–aren’t necessary. I found myself doing just fine at the hardest difficulty level with only about six points spent in the Physical and Combat skill trees. On the other hand, I dumped lots of points into the Science and Tech trees because some of the parts of the game I’d looked forward to most (building outposts and spaceships) required a great deal of investment to fully enjoy. The missions I completed in search of the next skill point were repetitive–just fine if I wanted somethign to do while listening to an audiobook, but insufficient for enjoying the thing itself.

In most things in life, I value substance over style. In Starfield, I loved the visual style of the game, with a mostly low-fi feel of hardscrabble colonists trying to make it among the stars. But I found the substance greatly lacking. Each faction has one main “city” (which is far too generous a word, as these were more like well-established villages), and the entire explorable system only has about ten “hub” locations where you can manage your ship, resupply, find story missions, etc. In general, for having 1,000 planets you could land on, the galaxy felt really empty, both of people and of stories. I understand that a good portion of that is a matter of the realities of programming, storage size, computing power, etc.

The factions that govern those locations seemed all too cliche as well. You have the United Colonies, your generic “democracy in space” faction with its UN-like governing council and penchants for militarism and capitalism. To counter that, you have the Freestar Collective, a generic affiliation of liberty-loving space cowboys. The third “major” faction is the Crimson Fleet, a group of space pirates. While they are a joinable faction, I shot too many space pirates too early in the game to ever have a chance of being welcome at their HQ space station. There’s also Ryujin Industries, but I lost interest in the game prior to starting their storyline.

Then there’s the House of Va’Ruun, a generic and poorly-defined space cult that likes serpents; the Ecliptic mercenaries, your generic “bad-guy” mercs who seem to be doing a lot of things across the galaxy without much reason; the Trade Authority, a generic syndicate dealing in illicit goods behind a semi-legitimate storefront; the House of the Enlightened, your generic do-gooder space atheists; the Sanctum Universuum, a generic faith organization without much explanation of actual beliefs; and the Spacers, an eclectic group of space crazies removed from Firefly’s Reavers only by a lack of grotesque body-modification and unshielded reactors.

If I’ve used the word “generic” overmuch, I hope that offers some microcosm of what I felt playing the game.

I did not form a connection to any of the characters in the game. I had to double-check to see if the voice actor for Barrett was the same person who voiced Preston Garvey in Fallout 4 (he’s not)–Barrett annoyed me to such an extent I had convinced myself they were one and the same, perhaps an intentional (and cruel) joke played on Starfield players who’d come from Fallout.

Speaking of Fallout 4, I couldn’t help but make comparisons, particularly as I got closer to the end of Starfield‘s main story. I really disliked the main line of quests in Starfield, which made me think, briefly, of how far Bethesda’s writers had fallen since the last Fallout game (not counting Fallout 76, of course, which I actually enjoyed, but more because of playing with friends than the game itself). I quickly remembered that I’d hated the main story in Fallout 4 as well, so this was probably just par for the course. But I really enjoyed individual quests and many (maybe most) of the side quests in Fallout 4, where Starfield‘s quests felt generic (there’s that word again) and, frankly, uninteresting. It was the gameplay loop of gear and gaining skill points that kept me playing the game, not the setting or the story, which ultimately left me feeling like the time spent on the game had been wasted, not used to indulge in a deep and entertaining fantastic world. As gameplay loops are intended to be addictive, and my discipline in resisting them is relatively low, the game began to feel like a hated dealer to whom I consistently returned for just one more hit, chasing a vaguely-remembered high I’d probably never find again after the first few hours of the game.

If you’ve played Fallout 4, add some quality of life improvements, then add some new quality of life problems, and then add starships and space combat, and you’ve basically got Starfield. I understand that the game was built on a “new engine” (or at least an iterative improvement on previous engines used by Bethesda), but the game looked and felt much like Fallout in its menus and UI. Also like Fallout, resource management for building outposts and improving gear was mind-numbingly cumbersome.

I did enjoy the spaceship building–modifying my existing spaceships and building new ones from scrap was my favorite part of the game–but it just wasn’t enough to overcome my other disappointments. In terms of gameplay, I really enjoyed boarding and taking enemy ships. For extra hilarity, hanging out on a planet until a Crimson Fleet or Ecliptic ship lands, running straight up their boarding ramp and inside, a jacking their ride while they’re standing around wondering what just happened proved highly amusing, if only for the first two times.

It did give me an idea, though–I’d love to see a sci-fi, less-cartoony version of Sea of Thieves set in space, with emergent story and satisfying gameplay that doesn’t need character improvement loops to make the game entertaining. Maybe we’ll see something like that in the future. I spend a little bit of time playing No Man’s Sky, which has some of that, at least.

Despite my disappointments, I see a great future for Starfield. It’ll make an amazing platform for modders to work their magic and add wonderful content (and some questionable content) to the game as they’ve done with Skyrim and Fallout. My suggestion, then, is to wait a few months or years for a plethora of mods to fill in the gaps in the base game and then venture into the stars.

One other good thing came from my playing the game–it inspired me to finally start getting Cortex Prime rules and a detailed setting together for a sci-fi game of my own. I’m calling the setting Astra Inclinant; I’m sure you’ll hear about it on the blog soon.

I’ve turned now to slowly playing through Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty, so I’ll review that once I’m finished. Already, though, I’m enjoying it more than Starfield, and the “2.0” version of the game makes great changes, so if you’ve never played Cyberpunk 2077, or if you haven’t played it in a long while, now’s the time.

I know; I’m a little late to the game if I’m reviewing a book that’s twenty-five years old. But I’m excited about it enough that I really don’t care about that.

So, we’re gonna talk about Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, an exposition of theodicy wrapped in a sci-fi tale that’s secretly a bildungsroman of sorts. If you’re not a theology nerd, “theodicy” is the word for the study of the problems of evil and suffering. In Christianity, in particular, this problem might be more specifically phrased as “If God is all-powerful and entirely good and loving, why does God allow evil and suffering in the world? Why do these things happen to seemingly good people?”

Job is my favorite book of the Old Testament, in part because it addresses this very question and gives us the best answer I think can be had for it. When God appears to Job at the end of the poem, God’s answer to Job’s questioning is to tell Job that he cannot understand the answer. It’s too complex, it’s too nuanced, for the human brain to comprehend in all its depths. The ultimate answer God gives that humans can understand is “Trust me.” Faith, faith that God is sovereign over all things, that God is love and intends ultimate good for God’s creation, hope that everything will one day be clear and suffering and evil will be conquered fully after having served their purposes–as inscrutable to us as those purposes may be–is the answer. It is, admittedly, an answer that I find at once entirely frustrating and comforting. It’s not my job to solve the problem of evil and suffering; it’s my job to respond to evil in suffering in the way that God has instructed me.

Part of the brilliance and beauty of Russell’s book–and only part, mind you–is that she takes the same approach. There is no attempt to answer the question of suffering, only an attempt to hold it in her hands and turn it at all angles for the reader to view, to experience in part, all of its manifest complexity and difficulty. There are no apologies here, no arguments, only an investigation of the issue that is by turns beautiful and terrifying, humbling and infuriating.

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but I’ve got to at least tell you what the book is about, right? All of that investigation into theodicy is not exposition or diatribe, it is examined through the experiences and humanity of the characters.

The Sparrow tells of the aftermath of a first-contact mission put together in secret by the Society of Jesus to the planet of Rakhat, discovered by the Arecibo facility in Puerto Rico in 2019, when the astronomy equipment there picks up radio signals that turn out to be the singing of the indigenous peoples of Rakhat.

Only priest and linguist Emilio Sandoz survives the mission; the handful of clergy and layperson companions that accompany him to Rakhat do not. The time dilation of space travel, the reports of the second, secular mission to Rakhat, and reports from the first missionaries themselves seem to tell the tale of a horrific fall from grace and into depravity on the part of Sandoz. The story jumps back and forth between the Jesuit interviews with the recovered Sandoz (in an attempt to discover the truth of the reports and, hopefully, salvage something of the Jesuit reputation after the reports of the missionary journey have decimated it), the first discovery of Rakhat and the synchronicity that brought Sandoz and his companions into the mission in the first place, and the events that actually unfolded on Rakhat. These separate narratives meet, as it were, at the climax of Sandoz’s telling of his story.

That main thread, and its analysis of theodicy, contrasted with the modern missionaries’ own thoughts about their relationship to the 16th century missions of the Jesuits to the “New World”, form the core of the text, but Russell’s writing of the missionary characters, their backgrounds, their feelings, their developing relationships to one another, their thoughts about their places in Creation as they confront their missionary (or priestly) status, provides just as much literary joy and human insight as the “mystery” that frames all of these subplots.

This is, after all, a sci-fi story (one for which Russell won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 1996, the year the book was published), and great detail is paid to the physiology and culture of the peoples of Rakhat, to the methods of space travel (the missionaries convert a mined-out asteroid into their spaceship) and the believable physics of story. At the same time, those elements never get in the way of the narrative; no time is lost on long exposition about the nature of technologies or theories of culture and alien psychology. These run seamlessly throughout the text, woven in with the unfolding plot instead of interrupting it.

The writing itself is beautiful, jealousy-inducing for an aspiring writer such as myself. The blend of familiar, practical tone with clever description and amusing turn-of-phrase reveals the intelligence and imagination of the mind behind this tale in an ever-delightful manner. The pacing and plotting of the story are an example of mastercraft in that aspect of the art, something especially apparent to me as I struggle with revising the plotting and pacing of my own fledgling work.

I must also express a debt of gratitude to my wife for bringing me to read this book. It’s one she first read–and told me about–almost a decade ago. It sounded interesting, but I must not have been paying close enough attention to her explanations, because this a book that fits with my own interests so uncannily perfectly. Only when she announced that she was going to read it again, now that her experiences in ministry and seminary had sharpened her abilities to appreciate the tale, did I agree to read it alongside her. As I must often admit, she was right all along. I should’ve read it the first time she told me to. So should you.