Bethesda fans are looking forward to E3 in the hopes that the studio's mysterious space-set RPG Starfield will finally be fully unveiled, confirming some of the rumors and leaks that have been in circulation ever since the game was first announced back at E3 2018. Bethesda's recent history has seen the studio lose some of its good-will, even among long-term fans. Fallout 76, by Todd Howard's own admission, "let a lot of people down." While some are excited by the prospect of Bethesda's new IP, others are reluctant to get too excited for the studio's future.
Even if Starfield doesn't end up being the groundbreaking RPG experience Bethesda needs to rebuild its reputation, its development could still mean great things for the hard sci-fi genre in gaming. Hard sci-fi is particularly difficult to pull off, but there are some reliable leaks indicating that Bethesda could be making some big leaps forward that could help establish the genre's future place in triple-A gaming.
Hard And Soft Sci-Fi
The difference between hard and soft sci-fi is blurry at times, but it's ultimately all about varying degrees of suspension of disbelief. Star Wars is full of space wizards, artificial gravity, English-speaking aliens, and faster-than-light travel, making it soft sci-fi. Mass Effect is full of space wizards (biotics), artificial gravity, English-speaking aliens, and faster-than-light travel, although the use of the Mass Relays helps cover for the last point somewhat. Star Trek, Borderlands, Fallout, and The Outer Worlds can all be considered soft sci-fi.
On the other end of the spectrum are stories and settings which, while not necessarily entirely grounded in reality, try to entrench themselves in real-world physics and tighten up the suspension of disbelief required by the audience. The Expanse novels, for example, limit humanity's space colonization to Earth's solar system, go into detail about the varying effects of different levels of gravity on the bodies of its characters, and generally tries to create a future which seems more realistic than those found in series like Star Trek, at least at first.
One of the major problems for hard sci-fi has always been adaptation. It's relatively easy for a softer sci-fi series like Mass Effect to declare that artificial gravity and unexplained universal translators exist, and to then tell their stories from there without worrying about those details again. When adapting for any kind of screen - whether for TV, movies, or video games - portraying the more realistic physics of hard sci-fi can become very difficult. This is evidenced by The Expanse TV show, which had to reign in some of the book's harder sci-fi features, like the elongated 6 to 7-foot frames of the characters who grew up in low gravity. Movies with huge budgets like Interstellar and Gravity can pull off hard sci-fi, but they remain in the monetary minority.
Many fans of hard sci-fi have turned to video games in the past in the hope that the hard sci-fi genre might flourish when unrestricted by the need to film real actors and set-pieces. However, while there have been some impressive hard sci-fi games like Observation in recent years, many attempts have struggled to create the realistic physics hard sci-fi demands, especially in an open-world setting. That is where Starfield could come in.
Starfield's Sci-Fi
There's quite a bit of evidence that Starfield will err on the side of hard sci-fi. For a start, several Bethesda employees visited SpaceX during development, which formed the basis for a lot of the game's visuals. Several leaked images were also released that appeared to be confirmed when Bethesda's managing director Ashley Cheng was seen wearing a matching logo on his shirt during Brighton Digital 2020. These images show a player character with a jet pack, and a compass which measures Oxygen, CO2, and gravity.
Next to nothing is known about Starfield's story for now, and the studio's storytelling has often been criticized in comparison to Bethesda's huge open worlds in the past. However, even if Starfield's story ends up falling flat, a triple-A developer with a big budget developing a game which attempts to realistically render space physics for both ships and player characters could be a huge step forward for hard sci-fi in gaming. The gravity meter on the compass implies that different planets will have different levels of gravity, which will presumably affect how the player moves through that open space. The jet pack and spaceship also indicate that Bethesda will have to figure out several different ways to render moving through open environments with varying gravity.
If all of this is true, it presents Bethesda with some huge challenges. Combat and exploration will have to be exciting in low gravity and high gravity, without ignoring just how different those environments would be. Worlds will have to be designed in a way that makes sure high gravity doesn't become an unbearably slow slog, while low gravity doesn't become a massively preferable way to speed-run for resources. It is known that developers have been making some significant changes to Bethesda's engine for Starfield. If those upgrades are being designed to help create realistic and variable physics, it could lay the foundations for future sci-fi games even if Starfield's world and story end up being underwhelming.
For now, however, fans will have to wait to see the scope of Bethesda's ambition. The studio certainly needs to be ambitious, with none of its games since Skyrim quite able to make the same industry-changing splash that The Elder Scrolls5 made. Whether or not that ambition will extend to the game's physics as much as the leaks would indicate remains to be seen. However, even if the game doesn't live up to expectations, many hard sci-fi fans will be hoping it could set a precedent and develop new systems that could help the genre flourish in a way that it has often struggled to thrive off the page.
Starfield is in development.