Starting Over
A thing that happens.
With this post, we exit August and enter September and the Sunday “Showing Up” video starts appearing on Monday instead. So in a couple more months, this Substack is going to convert from “whatever I feel like writing” into a preview of the coming week and wrap-up of the previous week.
I’m not entirely sure how that’s going to look or work. I sort of want to start doing some sort of coherent theme for the week? But really idk. I think I will start with my to-do list for the game, and just talk about each individual task as I work on it.
This is sort of like starting over with the whole thing. Which I recently did with Starfield, taking in the process my first photo in a very long time that isn’t of Huong Le in Neon.
Designing the beginning of a game is a delicate thing. It’s easy to forget, when you’ve gotten very far into a game, what it is like being at the very beginning of that game. I find myself missing all the Starborn powers, obviously, but more importantly there is a lot of stuff locked behind level-gating. No matter how much money I have, I can’t get a semi-automatic weapon made; I either luck into one from a loot table, or I make one myself.
But to make a semi-automatic weapon, I need level 3 Weapons Engineering. And that is three skill points, but it is also a tier 2 skill that needs me to spend four more skill points in tier 1 skills before I can get Weapons Engineering at all.
And that is effectively saying you can’t have a semi-automatic weapon until you are at least level 8, provided of course you don’t want any other skills, which of course you do. So chances are good you can’t do this until you are level 20 or 30 - there are at least a half dozen other skills you need more than this, and you’ll want most of them at level 2 or 3 at least.
That is a lot of investment for fairly little benefit. I mean, it’s a big benefit now — it will reduce my ammo usage so I can actually take down enemies without emptying entire magazines into them — but by the time I grind out the levels I need for it, I’ll have solved that problem some other way.
And that’s kind of bullshit.
I think that’s intentional, in the case of Starfield. I think the beginning of the game is supposed to be a massive pile of bullshit that you have to plow through to get anywhere. I think they’ve tried to draw out the process of getting your character to a point where you can actually engage meaningfully with the open world, so you have to rely on missions and other people, so you will resent needing to.
And then when you get to the point that you can engage on your own terms, you will. But I think a lot of people have gone the opposite direction entirely, of thinking that because you have to rely on others in the early game, that is how you are supposed to be playing… and when they outgrow it, and the people they rely on become a liability, they think something is wrong with the game.
I’m perfectly aware I may be giving the game too much credit. I like to assume that when a project has taken many years to complete and dozens of people have had a hand in it, everything it does has been done on purpose and plenty of smart people looked at it and said “is this really what we want to do?” and the consensus was “yes, because of reasons.”
That… isn’t always how it goes. You’re already thinking of at least one game that hit the market horribly, awfully broken. And that can happen! I know it can happen, and I always consider whether that is what has happened.
But what Starfield does is not clearly and obviously broken, it is just… very different. It evolves. It becomes a different game as you play it longer, and you have to play it differently. Backing up to the beginning has reminded me that in the early stages of Starfield, I did not like it as much.
And as I’ve looked at it for the past few days, across about fifty hours of gameplay in three different level 1 playthroughs, I have come to realise that I don’t like it as much because I have played late-game Starfield — which is better.
It’s kind of like how Star Wars was the most amazing movie in the world in 1978 because the world of 1978 had never seen Star Wars. Today, all the inventions we saw for the first time in Star Wars… not just the story elements, but the visual and sound effects which had never been done before… are in everything. If you grew up in the 1990s or the 2000s, like the children of the people who saw Star Wars in theatres, you look at the original and it’s… okay? I guess? But you’ve seen all this before, a thousand times.
It’s hard for me to be excited about crawling slowly through an installation, switching weapons to whatever actually has ammo, when I have been through this same place like buckwheat through a goose dozens of times in the late game. It feels like I am being deliberately held back from the cool, fun experience I could be having.
Starting over is like that. It feels like you should already be having a cool, fun experience rather than struggling to build up to one, because you have already done that struggling once before.
Sometimes it feels like the struggling only ever leads to more struggling.