Starfield and the Urban environment in Bethesda games

 I wrote an article about my impressions of Neon in Starfield as well as my impressions of Akila and New Atlantis. These cities are the main hubs in the game, and they represent some of the best work I have seen Bethesda do with urban environments in video games. In comparison with the sparse towns of Skyrim, these cities are some of the most realistic cities I have seen in a video game in my opinion. It is definitely better than what we had in Cyberpunk 2077, with its rather boring scenes and static npcs. Of course, people have been trying to criticize the game for months, nitpicking everything they can about the game. They have been claiming that Starfield is not a game that is worth the time to buy. However, I have to say that the cities alone in this game are worthy of the price of admission. 

This is one of the most beautiful aspects of the game.

Bethesda has always been moving towards more realism in their games since they made The Elder Scrolls: Arena some 30 years ago. Some people complain that these cities are boring, but Starfield's cities are some of the most realistic I have seen the studio in years. Going from Oblivion to Skyrim was a real downgrade in the quality of the cities. When one looks at the screenshot above, one gets a sense of awe at the tower that is in center of the Imperial City. There is hardly anything comparable to that in Skyrim, where the cities are so small that they are more like fortified hill towns. I have been spending some time with exploring the section of Oblivion that is between the city of Chorrol and the Imperial City. This is a part of the map that I hardly even spend time in but it is probably one of the best parts of the map. There is a serene aspect to the Great Forest in Oblivion that you do not find in other parts of the game map. The video game's engine seems to really thrive in the Great Forest in a way that other parts of the game doesn't show in that way.

In Oblivion, NPCs can be seen doing any sort of activity can believe, adding to the realism of the game

The thing that Oblivion has in comparison to Skyrim was those small towns and villages that were not the main game hubs in the game. There are towns in Oblivion that even have inns and shops. While Skyrim has the same, those towns were more like set pieces rather than actual towns in the game. I have generally seen Skyrim as a game that was trying more to be about the rural nature of the province versus the urbanism of Cyrodil but Bethesda did not really build out the villages in Skyrim very well. Instead of trying to make Skyrim have a different feel to it, the developers essentially just made the province just like Cyrodill but with much smaller towns. This made the province not seem as genuine to me. 

Bethesda was right in calling Starfield more like Oblivion than Skyrim.

The streets in the Imperial City are clean in an almost surreal aspect.

I was actually quite happy when they said that. Skyrim has gotten too much attention in the Elder Scrolls and Oblivion and Morrowind and even the earlier games get ignored. While I haven't played any Elder Scrolls games before Oblivion, I appreciate what the Bethesda team did with those games. Morrowind's cities were a huge upgrade from the rather sparse cities in Daggerfall and Arena.  Those two games were based largely on sprites so they were limited on how they could render their environments. However, Morrowind was truly a big change in the franchise. It has been seen standing among some of the greats of that age like Deus Ex and I can see why. Morrowind had some really interesting and unique cities. They all had interesting architecture and had a culture that went along with them.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was cutting edge when it came to NPCs.

Starfield is really a game that combines the best of Morrowind and Oblivion with a new coat of paint and gives us cities that are truly unique, have a density about them. The space in these cities is not a waste as it is in other games. Cyberpunk 2077's Night City is a waste in its usage of the urban space. The NPCs are not advanced enough to even justify the density of the city. It's all for show and the shops are sparse and have no character. I expected that Cyberpunk 2077 would have had hacker gangs that would attack the player and try to steal information or other more mundane gangs that would wander around and you could communicate to them. However, what we got in the game was the traditional npcs that have less character than in Oblivion. While people have said that the npcs in Oblivion were rather humorous in that they were repeating conversations but in spite of having those limitations, they were much more alive than a game that had much better graphics. I sometimes just start Oblivion just to look at the behaviors of the AI in the game.

The streets of Oblivion are oddly lacking in crowds like Starfield has.

Starfield's cities are very much alive in a way that you do not see in Skyrim. While the NPCs are not yet at the level where the player has to worry about their actions as if such AI characters are behaving, Starfield's NPCs are a step up from what we saw in Skyrim. It is a return to Oblivion style NPCs even though the NPCs in the game do not all have their own house. However, considering how big this game is, it is understandable that the developers were not able to put all that content into the game.  

Akila, New Atlantis, Neon and many other smaller cities in the game all look quite different from each other. They all have different factions and as well as intriguing looks at social stratification in societies set in the future. In comparison with many other Science-fiction works, Starfield takes a more mature approach to talking about social stratification and issues of power in these societies. Instead of focusing on issues of identity in urban landscapes, the game focuses on the economic issues that are still influencing the behavior of humanity. 

The Imperial City in Oblivion

Unlike the Imperial City in Oblivion, it is clear the technology in video games is giving us some more realistic urban environments.  In each major city, the game provides us with many vibrant crowd scenes that were not in many games outside of Assassin's Creed or Mass Effect. It is important to remember that video games that generally take place in open worlds tend to be very resource intensive. It has taken time for such games to get more sophisticated and be able to give us fully realized worlds that have vibrancy. 

Each of the cities in Starfield have a story to tell which is unique to them. Even the small colonies that are randomly made by the game and some of the installations on the many planets on the game, there is a sense of history and culture to those buildings. That is why I really enjoy playing this game.

The NPCs in Starfield are really big jump towards having truly immersive AI characters that act just like human beings in the real world. That is why I hope to see in the Elder Scrolls VI.