Three months later and everyone is still talking aboutBaldur’s Gate 3. My social media channels are filled with fan art of characters and headcanons that take the likes of Astarion, Shadowheart, and Karlach to a range of extraordinary - and filthy - places. Their stories, personalities, and the actors known for bringing them to life have taken on a cultural position of their own, causing millions the world over to fall in love with them. Then you haveStarfield, which has characters in it, I suppose.
Recent years have proven that compelling characters can speak louder than gameplay and narrative. They offer players a personal hook they can cling onto to form meaningful bonds with their companions by taking them on epic adventures, sympathising with their plight, and eventually saving them from themselves. This goes double if you’ve created a character who also exists in the world, making decisions and establishing your own agency to create fond memories that endure long after your journey has ended.
We don’t remember Mass Effect, Dragon Age, or The Witcher for their gameplay. We remember them for the characters they made us fall in love with and the stories they told.
This is where Starfield falters and how it failed to craft meaningful stories for most of its companions that fold seamlessly into the places we explore. It feels rigid and railroaded in most instances, with characters like Andreja and Sam Coe not dishing out backstories to us after a traumatic story sequence or experiencing something resonant to them personally, but instead through robotic trawls of exposition designed to spew out the moment you’ve spent enough time together. Whether I’ve just murdered dozens of pirates in cold blood or happen to be staring at rocks on a newly discovered planet, there is no wrong place for a natter. It’s soulless and rarely engrossing, a shame because some of the seeds planted by Bethesda in its writing do show promise, but the execution constantly lets them down.
Striving for a semi-realistic depiction of our future results in some fascinatingly familiar bits of technology peppered throughout the space opera, although it simultaneously shackles it to a perpetual state of mundanity. One its characters can never escape, and much fail to deliver details about themselves that don’t feel forced or fed to you because companions are duty bound to do something, even if it means falling in love after following you around for the entire game. Nothing about it feels natural, and even retiring to The Lodge in vain attempts to catch up with everything feels like burning through dialogue in pursuit of very little gain.
Your closeness with its characters' struggle to feel convincing while pushing them away also comes across as rash and unrealistic. I can travel the galaxy with Sarah Morgan murdering and pillaging, but the second I pull my gun on a random pilot she runs away and refuses to speak to me ever again, like I’ve crossed a point of no return that never before existed. It’d be a different story if Starfield allowed characters to realistically chime in on conversations and quests, instead of coming along for the ride and largely staying out of the way. It’s the beauty of an RPG, and how there is rarely a way to predict any and all of the outcomes we come across.
Our job is to embrace what comes, whether surprising gameplay ideas or changing character dynamics. Starfield doesn’t have that, and it’s difficult not to notice as millions continue to lose themselves in Baldur’s Gate 3. It is a step beyond in terms of writing and characters, folding dozens of companions and supporting cast members into your journey that each feel alive, moving forward with their own flaws and motivations you’re able to choose to ignore or indulge. Some can even perish, but your journey continues, while emotional and physical scars refuse to heal. Consequences, and your sense of place, feel real in spite of the fantasy world you explore. Starfield, and the majority of modern Bethesda RPGs, don’t have that quality. It was easier to forgiveSkyrimorFallout 4, but things have changed.
A couple of months removed from the launch of both games, the foundations of their individual legacies are beginning to form, and it’s clear which of the two we’ll be talking about in years to come. Starfield isn’t a bad game. In many ways, it’s the best game Bethesda has ever made, but when it occupies the same familiar mechanical and narrative blueprint we’ve been dabbling in since Oblivion, the comparisons to far more capable contemporaries is impossible. Even The Outer Worlds, which is a fairly obvious riff on the formula by Obsidian Entertainment, is able to craft strong character stories using the same cadence because it understands how to build developments in a way that feels convincing. Starfield doesn’t, and it’s hard to avoid feeling like a cog in the machine when the same conversations around you keep repeating.
Baldur’s Gate 3 will have a tremendous impact on the future of the RPG genre, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Bethesda, BioWare, Obsidian, and the majority of beloved studios in the industry were looking upon it with envious eyes. Begging to find out how Larian was able to not only create an intricately layered video game with endless permutations, but pepper it with characters and moments that have stuck in the public consciousness in ways I’ve never seen a game accomplish before. At least not since the golden age of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and even then, it feels like it’s on another level entirely.
Shadowheart, Astarion, Karlach, Lae’zel, Gale, and the majority of companions are detailed enough in their personalities and struggles to carry their own games, with fans already busy crafting additional backstories and character quirks through their own content that effectively bleeds into the game itself, creating something greater and more memorable that will remain with us for years to come. There is nothing else quite like it, and it’s funny to think that Larian decided to delay its console release to dodge Starfield’s wrath, when in reality, I think the opposite would have proven far more beneficial. An RPG without strong characters is worthless, and one with beloved characters is unstoppable.
