Highlights
- Starfield's Ryujin Industries Executive Level mission offers a unique experience, taking players into the cutthroat world of corporations, similar to HBO's Succession in space.
- Players can join different factions in Starfield, but Ryujin Industries breaks the mold by allowing players to climb the corporate ladder and experience a more realistic setting.
- The final mission in Ryujin Industries questline, "Executive Level," mirrors an episode of Succession, as players must make important decisions during a stockholders meeting and choose a side to support.
One of the most creative ways to tell stories in role-playing games like Starfield is through quests, as these put the player at the center of the action. Many exciting missions in the game have the explorer clearing out mines and outposts teeming with pirates and spacers and establishing first contact with an unknown species. As such, a quest set in a corporate office, like Starfield’s Ryujin Industries Executive Level mission, may seem like a boring one for experienced players. However, the mission gives a player a glimpse at the cutthroat and high-stakes world of corporations with a story that’s pretty much like HBO’s Succession in space.
Starfield is Bethesda’s newest open-world role-playing game, which takes the developer’s winning formula of action-based combat combined with an extensive perk system, to a space-themed setting. The player can freely join other factions in the game by picking up their questlines. Some of them offer similar experiences to the Thieves Guild in Skyrim and The Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 4, with the player joining a tight-knit band of lovable outlaws or a dangerous team of enforcers. Starfield’s Ryujin Industries breaks this mold, by giving the player a more true-to-life experience: climbing up the corporate ladder.
How Starfield’s Ryujin Industries Missions Turn the Player into a Succession Character
Starfield's Ryujin Industries, like Succession’s Waystar Royco, is a mega-corporation that has influence as far as the eye can see and fortune as much as the mind can fathom. For those unfamiliar with the show, Succession is a comedy-drama that centers on the fight for the control of media conglomerate Waystar Royco, as the company’s founder and long-time chief executive’s health declines. Most of the story revolves around the founder’s children as they try to defend their positions as successors to the company against other family members and colleagues.
Lots of people in the Starfield universe can only dream of having the experience and skills necessary to join Ryujin Industries. Fortunately for the player, they don’t need such qualifications to start their career at Ryujin Industries. They can make like the nepotism hires in Succession, like Greg Hirsch and Tom Wambsgans, and get in without breaking a sweat.
While the player does have to go through an application process during the Back to The Grind quest, nothing they answer will cause them to fail their exam and interview. The initial quests have the player go through similar experiences as Greg, Tom, and other low to middle-level execs in Succession, with tasks involving corporate espionage and sabotage. It’s these experiences that give the player a ruthless drive to rise through the ranks until they become worthy of a seat on the chief executive table.
Starfield’s Ryujin Industries Executive Level Mission Feels Like an Episode of Succession
The final mission in the Ryujin Industries questline is called “Executive Level” and it’s exactly how it sounds. The player has helped, betrayed, and even murdered during their climb up Ryujin’s messy corporate ladder, and now it’s time to get the executive position they’ve worked so hard for. This mission has the strongest resemblance to a Succession episode, as it forces the explorer to pick a side during an important vote during a stockholders meeting. Here, one can choose to sell the company to market Neuroamp, acquire Infinity LTD, or make Ularu Chen, the newly exposed Ryujin Industries mole the CEO. Not only that, they also have to convince the other board members to support them.
The first two decisions won’t greatly alter the course of the faction questline. However, the last choice will cause one to conspire in the usurping of the company’s current CEO and replace them with a mole who fed information to the company’s biggest competitor. This mission is reminiscent of the various stockholder voting sessions that happened in Succession, which often involved the main character Kendall Roy opposing his father's, the founder and CEO Logan Roy, wishes. The player, in this instance, is a lot like Tom or Greg in Succession's finale. They hold information that could work in favor of each side, now they just have to play their cards right.
Starfield is available now for PC and Xbox Series X/S.