Starfield and the problem of scale
Minor Starfield lore spoiler's ahead
Originally written for /r/games, but the last discussion thread of Starfield in that place saw many user who said they personally like the game downvoted and replied to by mentally-questionable individuals that said not-so-nice things.
As I pass 170 hours in Bethesda newest, hottest, controversial game. I am happy because it is just as fun as I had hoped it to be.
Yet as I explore the cities it has to offer there is always a small detail that I keep failing to ignore (whenever I'm not busy thinking of new ship designs that is).
200,000 units are ready with a million more on the way
So say the slender being that has been tasked with creating an army to defend a galactic spanning government of countless worlds. At this point Montgomery, Zhukov, MacArthur, Jodl, or any-other-WW2-command-figure-of-your-choosing are rolling on the ground clapping each other's backs laughing their socks off. Because 1.2 million is an absolutely puny and pathetic number of troops for a galactic war.
I'm no Star Wars deep lore fan, I understand that fans and later authors has since tried to 'fix it' by making the Clone War more that just the clones. And yet those 1.2M clones was all there was when episode 2 released to theatres.
Most Sci-fi writings has similar a problem with scaling to their subject. It is not news. It even has a tv tropes page (the page is more about distances, but it's in the same ballpark).
Quest for the Peoplefield
So where does Starfield go wrong in this? The ships are puny. The wars and the numbers stated are puny.
Certainty more ways than one, but the one that I wish to focus on is this: where the hell are all the people?
A brief summary of the lore. Humanity has invented FTL and has seemingly solved all energy problems. They had to evacuate Earth, but this was successful and so the starfield should be absolutely teeming with tens of billions of human souls spreading to all corners of the galaxy and its many already habitable worlds.
And yet, Starfield feels so barren. I see no grand interstellar civilizations. Only dirt huts on a hill surrounded by walls that support barely a thousand people. Yet this dirt hill is supposed to be a capital or an interstellar superpower. Heck, they are even scared shitless of their own fauna.
The opposites capital is no dirt hill, yet still smaller than a modern earth country town.
And it's not like the main population centers are just outside player-accessible areas. All the NPCs ever talk about are Akila, New Atlantis, and Neon. These tiny puny cities.
It doesn't feel like the evacuation of Earth was a success. It feels like it was a catastrophe, and all that remains are scattered remnants playing civilization.
And yet... The Starfield is actually lively, just not where it should be. There is a scale imbalance, because spread across nearly every world in the settled systems are countless research stations, outposts, deserted or populated, you name it.
Yes, those procedually-generated buildings that spawn nearly everywhere you land in the settled systems.
Where did these come from? Surely the UC couldn't have built them. Manning just the ones that I have come across in my playthrough would empty New Atlantis 10 times over!
Bethesda built their open-world game style upon Fallout and Elder Scrolls. For both it makes sense that the worlds are sparely populated. One being post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the other a medieval society.
But now they have built something in a completely different realm. But they way in which Bethesda built the scale at which the game is presented remains the same.
So why did they go with this approach? I don't know. Maybe they just like making "small" worlds and didn't want to fit the new universe. Maybe the idea of 'climbing any mountain you can see' is a very hard rule and they didn't want to limit player movement in metropolises, that would undoubtedly be unfeasible to make fully traversable.
But lets pretend they actually tried. And perhaps it can be done without really changing how the game is designed or played.
So you can do it better huh?
A Microsoft executive plays the game as it's nearing launch. He feels there is something missing with the scale of the Starfield universe.
So he does the only rational thing he can think of and storms into the street and picks the first rando he can find, puts the Bethesda crown upon his head, and orders him to fix Starfield's problem of scale.
The exec is later found to be mentally ill and fired, but it does not matter for I am now king of Bethesda and my words are design directives.
Tell, don't show
The simple solution that requires no real work but some change in lore. New Atlantis is no longer a capital, just a administrative and diplomatic outpost. Akila is now just a small border city. The real population centers are now on entirely different worlds. Inaccessible to the player.
Why can't players go there? Well it shouldn't take much suspension of disbelief to acknowledge that governments might not want any random idiot, in a flying hunk of metal capable of tearing space-time at it seams, to go anywhere near their main population centers without considerable control.
NPCs should no longer talk of sprawling New Atlantis, Neon, or Akila, but rather these other places that you can see on the map but are not allowed to go to.
Show enough
The population planets are now accessible, but restricted in where you can land freely. On the map it should show big cities. And just like how you cannot land in water, you can neither land anywhere in cities or its surroundings.
Just like with New Atlantis and Akila, you can land at a designated spot. The difference is when you look into the horizon, because rather than a procedurally generated landscape you will instead see a sprawling metropolis that tells you "Yes here! Here are all the people!".
The other change would be that, unlike the landscape, if you try to go beyond the player-area of the city you will hit a wall. But that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
New Atlantis and Akila can stay, but like the other solution they would change status.
All in all the scale issue is no big problem and the game is fine as it is. This was just something that has been on mind for some time and I wanted to put it to writing. So do you agree that Starfield has a scale problem? If yes, how would you fix it? Or maybe I missed some crucial info-dump and the entire premise of this writing is wrong?
But it doesn't really have to be an engine limitation does it? As I write in one of my suggestions, a simple fake background asset of a mayor city would be enough. I don't actually have to be able to talk to every inhabitant of a billion people mega city, or loot their apartments. I just need to be able to see where they are.
“Fake background asset” just isn’t the type of game Bethesda makes, and people would be very disappointed if there were spaces in a bethesda game you couldn’t actually visit. If you think of every game they make as a 1:1000 scale model of the actual canon world it’s meant to represent, then it starts to make sense.
I haven't got to far in the main plot yet, so I'm not sure if it's ever revealed much. But my headcanon is that the evacuation from Earth didn't go well. You're looking at a post-apocalyptic universe. 99% of the human population didn't make it off; they died with Old Earth. Most human beings died horribly as their planet slowly became uninhabitable, clawing each other to pieces for the remaining dwindling resources. 10 billion people elbowing each other for space in a rapidly shrinking petri dish. That is how Old Earth died. It wasn't pretty; it was the greatest disaster in human history. And it left an indelible mark on human society and culture.
This has caused numerous cultural changes, but among them is a desire to spread out, to not keep too many eggs in one basket. Most of the population doesn't live in the big cities. The "big cities" may actually only have a few thousand people in them. The vast, vast majority of the human population lives in scattered tiny settlements.
Now, this may seem contradictory with the setting. After all, how do you have skyscrapers and interstellar fleets if you only have a few thousand people living in even the largest cities? While this would certainly be impossible at our level of technology, the level of automation in the Starfield setting makes it possible. Factories are almost entirely automated. The people of New Atlantis have skyscrapers simply because they want to have skyscrapers, not because they need to build them due to high land prices. They thought it would be neat to have one "big city" that recreated the feel of the great old metropolises, so they had their robots build a settlement out like an old downtown core. And they can maintain such an edifice again with their fleets of robotic servants.
And ships? Certainly you need a big factory, with thousands of workers, for that? Well no. Automation is so good you can build entire ships with just a handful of people. There are entire ship workshops and factories making major ships, staffed by maybe just a dozen people. When you build a ship the landing pad at your base, you are literally building a spaceship by yourself. You're ordering parts from various providers, having them shipped to you, and then having your robots assemble them together.
Industry works like a highly automated version of the early industrial putting-out system. Instead of manufacturing things in big central locations, they're built piecemeal at different locations. Maybe every little settlement you see often does some level of manufacturing to help pay the bills. A farmer can have a little automated factory in a back shed that turns out bolts, from materials mined on site, for some subassembly of a component that will eventually find its way onto a UC military vessel. All the assemblers and extractors you can build are part of this highly distributed manufacturing system. And all this distributed manufacturing is made possible by lots of automation and AI-based coordination.
As for the wars, I think of them from the perspective of American colonial history. Remember the French and Indian War? In US history, we're taught about it as a major nation-defining conflict. And for the US at the time, it absolutely was. Without that conflict, the American Revolution would have never happened or at least taken on a completely different character. It's a major part of early American history.
But look at the actual numbers. At the peak of the conflict, there were about 50,000 soldiers fighting on the various sides. For the North American colonies, 50,000 soldiers serving in a conflict had enough of an impact that the consequences would lead to a revolution.
But zoom out. Remember that the French and Indian War was just one theater in the much larger Seven Years' War. 1.8 million soldiers served in that war. This grand event in early American history was a rounding error in a larger global conflict between the French and British Empires.
And the same holds true for most early American wars. If you go through a history book and look at the various wars and skirmishes fought in colonial America and the early 19th century, often you find the numbers are surprisingly small. Hell, in the American Revolution itself, the US only fielded 40,000 men. That's a smaller number than will fit in many university football stadiums today. The grand battles you read about in books on early American history are tiny by modern standards. And even by the standards of the day, the standards of Continental European combat, the numbers were tiny. The US lost 6,800 in the Revolutionary War. A generation later, France alone would lose 2 million in the Napoleonic Wars, on top of the losses from the revolution.
In short, in Starfield, you are not looking at a happy vibrant future of a burgeoning, prosperous humanity. You're looking at a traumatized and scattered remnant, the lucky survivors of a fallen world, the few fortunate souls who managed to scrape and claw their way to a spaceship. Most people probably grow up with family stories about the horrible things their ancestors had to do in order to secure a spot on one of the few spaceships.
Humanity has learned the hard way not to put all its eggs in one basket. Also, the decimation of humanity selected for those who were most inclined to explore, raconteur, and colonize. Some very rich people might have been able to buy their way off the dying planet, but most of those that survived were those who already lived and worked in solar colonization prior to the doom of Earth. The kind of people who most loved to live in giant burgeoning metropolises stayed on Earth and ultimately perished in an apocalypse of cannibalism, starvation, and plague.
The reason Akila City is still afraid of the local wildlife? Because there legitimately are just a few thousand people living there. And while they could wipe out the wildlife immediately around the city if they wanted to, more would just come in from the surrounding area. To get to the point where the wildlife are zero threat, they would have to expand across the entire planet. And they simply don't have the numbers for that. Plus, after what happened to Earth, people are trying to have as little impact on their local environments as they can.
I agree that if you take current human population numbers and project them forward, the universe of Starfield looks woefully underpopulated. But let's imagine only a hundred million people got off Earth. With access to grav drive tech, they scattered to a thousand worlds. Automation enabled them to build sustainable colonies with small numbers of people. Maybe each of those thousand worlds has 10,000 settlements on them (not unreasonable considering how you can plop down on any random spot and usually see some sort of human settlement close by.) So humanity is now occupying 10 million settlements. Maybe the population growth rate has been modest due to the harsh realities of colony life. So maybe the average settlement has less than 50 people in it. The human exodus selected for those who most wanted to spread out and scatter, and that has been reflected in the development pattern we see. Then automation, AI, and communications technologies enable them to keep their tech up, even with such a dispersed settlement pattern. Finally, the wars we hear described were relatively small in scale, similar to the wars in colonial American history. The conflicts are epoch-defining events, but they're tiny compared to the scale of conflicts experienced on Old Earth.
I really like the way you look at this. It's a very plausible way to explain why the game is the way it is and that works for me.
We have tons of space stories with massive scale, this one doesn't have to be, and it's ok to be that way
Thanks. This is very much an essay in the mode of the old r/asksciencefiction. My approach is to try to explain everything we see in the context of the world as it's been shown to us. I don't necessarily believe this type of future or development pattern would be likely, even if we had tech like the grav drive. But that's OK. History always develops in ways that people could have never predicted. And my headcanon is that in the universe of Starfield, the vast majority of the species simply does live on small isolated outposts of maybe just a few dozen people.
Also, I wanted to try and frame it in context that many would be familiar with, the colonial and Revolutionary War period of American history. Also, for another interesting comparison. Consider the historic population of Boston. Boston was this great metropolis in early American history. Numerous vitally important events in the Revolutionary period occurred there. But the population at the time of the revolution was a burgeoning...16,000 people. In the 1790 census, The largest cities, New York and Philadelphia, had populations less than 30,000 people. The total population of the ten largest cities was approximately 152,000, or about 4.5% of the total US population. at the time. Compare that to today. Today the ten largest cities have a population of 26 million, or about 8% of the total population. (And that's only if you look at cities themselves, not metro areas.)
The point is that in the US Colonial era, the cities were much less of a deal than they are today. Sure, they had them, and they were where you had to go for certain rarer goods and services, but fewer people lived in them. And this was for two reasons. First, the tech simply required it. This was before the mechanization of farming, so most still lived on farms. But second, this was in the colonial era, an era where there was plenty of (stolen) land available for white European settlers to claim. If the cost of living grew to high or the wages too low in cities, people could just pack up, move out west to some newly available land on the frontier, and claim a farm for themselves. Unless you were actively involved in government or one of the urban industries, why deal with the high housing costs and general hassle of living in a big city?
And I see Starfield through the same lens. One of the principal factions is literally called the United Colonies. And there may be similar technological and social forces at play. Technically, it has become easy for anyone with a few credits to move to any number of potential settlement sites, have your robots crank out some habs and extractors, and start a little farm or outpost. It's not the same as 18th century yeoman farming, but advanced enough robotics has created a similar paradigm.
And social forces are also at play. Why pay the absurd rents in New Atlantis or live in the slums of Neon when you can just get in your ship, fly out to an empty plot somewhere, and start a new settlement all your own? You don't even have to deal with chronic isolation. Traveling from the furthest settlement to New Atlantis takes no more time than someone traveling from a distant suburb to a city center today. Hop in your ship, fly to orbit, jump to orbit of New Atlantis, scan and land. The entire settled systems are effectively in "commuting distance" of each other.
The only reason anyone lives in poverty in the Well or in Neon's slums are that not everyone has enough starting capital to get that first ship and starting equipment. You do need to have enough credits to own a ship, space suit, basic mining equipment, etc. And a similar dynamic occurred in Colonial America. Sure, you could leave some slum in Philadelphia, pack a wagon, and set out to the Ohio Valley...But only if you had enough cash for said wagon, supplies, equipment, the necessary knowledge, etc. Even in Colonial America, there were some number of desperate urban poor who simply didn't have the capital to pack up and move to a new plot out West.
That's ultimately the lens I view Starfield through. I view it as an allegory for Colonial America but far in the future and stretched across space.
I won't spoil anything for you, but the main quest line does touch deeply on what happened to Earth and humanity and why things are the way they are.
In regards to Lama Su's quote, he says "units" which doesn't necessarily have to mean a single clone. A unit could be a squad or a battalion or something. Then that 1.2 million scales with whatever a unit could be.
That's my head canon anyway, because yes 1.2 million for the clone wars is not feasible
I like talking about star wars hehe
To further your point, there are still arguments that even with a 1.2 trillion clones, the scale of the galactic war wouldn't be feasible, and the counter to that I've heard is that typically wars were fought over a planet's capital. Most were not anywhere close to as sprawling as our IRL world is, and governance was centralized around a hub. The control of which would dictate policy to the rest of the settlements on the planet. Most of the core worlds were impossible to properly fight in, a planet wide stalingrad was never going to be feasible, for example on a planet spanning city like Courscant. Most of those worlds were dealt with through sanctions, political maneuvering, subterfuge, or assassination.
The majority of the clone wars military combat was fought in the outer rim sieges, hopping between planets that reflect starfields, one or two major industrial or bureaucratic hubs surrounded by undeveloped land. Major resource gathering operations that were stuck in a tug of war between the separatists and republic. As much as it's visually styled towards WWII combat, the sheer manpower required is offset by the asymmetric nature of the fights (clone military hardware vastly outmatched the droids, but the droids could manufacture at a much larger scale, at a far greater disparity than say German and USSR in WWII). Massive ships allowed for the deployment of entire armies directly into a planet's capital in a matter of hours if not minutes. The issue of entrenched or hidden forces was less of an issue with Star Wars's magic scanning technology, that can give precise and encompassing information on all enemy forces for hundreds of kilometers, as well as orbital scanning.
Not to mention that the forces themselves were designed to work under pre-cognitive telekinetic samurai warrior monk generals. Boot for boot, there is no way the clones could take on a galaxy wide droid army, but at the proper scale, knowing the limited nature of their objectives during the sieges, and recognizing how much force (heh) multiplication was happening to each clone, I think it's easier to make sense of why there might be such a scale discrepancy between the size of the galaxy and the size of the clone army.
I have contemplated the same questions, in particular how the game's economy makes absolutely no logical sense. And I've come to the conclusion that perhaps I shouldn't try to force logic to it.
We often approach games quite similarly to films. And for whatever reason, contemporary cinema tends to lean quite heavily on the forms, ideas and methods of realism.
But what if we approached games more like we experience theatre, where we are typically more ready to suspend our disbelief? A table and a couple of chairs on an otherwise empty stage can convey us the location of a kitchen, just like four people swinging swords can signify an army.
What if we take Starfield's small settlements, strange economy and bonkers social structures not as realistic depictions, but as metaphorical or metonymical representations whose main purpose is to supply the canvas on which the game can paint its stories and ideas?
Another fun way to change the lore could be to hint that culturally, humans in space just don't live as densely as they did on Earth. It could be cultural trauma from having to evacuate so many people from Earth. And/or just a continuation of current trends where more developed countries tend to have a lower total fertility rate.
I'm reminded of the planet Solaria in Asimov's robot series. Where people lived alone in isolated grand estates and used automation to power all the agriculture and industries. That's an extreme example but who knows how human culture would respond to a galactic diaspora. especially early on in the process. A spread-out frontier existence where we don't put too many eggs in one basket might be plausible. At least for a little while.
Disclaimer: I'm only a few hours into Starfield so I don't really have a good grasp of the lore, I'm just daydreaming if I had the Bethesda crown how I would solve what is probably a technical/resource limitation that they would have run into trying to make a space metropolis.
I can see this too. I'm only a few hours in myself, but from listening to the lore from the museum in the police academy it seems that frontier life is plentiful.
I could see many individuals or families even opting to live as space caravaners. Just huddled up in their space vans and hopping from one rock to another.
I disagree with the "Tell, don't show notion" because I would prefer a game try and fail, while still making an alright environment than hint there's something bigger with a handwave of "you won't see that for reasons."
The only major issue I have with Starfield was that I felt let down by the scale as a setpiece, when I thought it was supposed to be the stage the game happens on. The systems are truly measured in astronomical units, but you can't traverse them like in No Man's Sky, requiring a Daggerfall-style fast travel system to do everything. It reduces the scale to a few button presses, but I guess that's how they travel in-universe anyway.
City density is a constant struggle that you're right, they justified in Fallout 3/NV and 4, but also struggled with in Elder Scrolls past Morrowind, all due to the same technical limitations.
I sort of just accepted the scale of the space wars because they seem to imply that a minority of people are actually taking to space amd were capable of combat, but that also may well have been ignorance and handwaving on my part.
There's a lot you cover I simply haven't bothered to think about, but all in all you make great points.
I'm sorry to have to reply with such a short response but
Engine limitation. It's just that. (and that I'm on mobile right now)
Look at Neon for example which have several loading screens to just move around its parts. The only reason for that is the number of entities that can be loaded without compromise too heavily on performances.
Now, mind you, creation engine is a fantastic engine. For modding.
And that's the point. Since some time already, Bethesda have understood that it doesn't matter if their game are mediocre at best (I played around 80 hours and experimented the ng+ as well), the important factor to drive their success is the easily modding content.
In that way, they are absolutely right on continuing to do what they do. After all they are not terrible games, they are just "raw" and the community take care in cooking them properly.
This was my biggest problem in Cyberpunk 2077, too. And the game was in fact commended for the "density of people", and all I kept thinking playing it was: This city is fucking dead! There's maybe 5% as many people around as there should be, plus, nothing ever actually happens.
And like you say, the problem only crops up because the devs decide they want to sell the facsimile of a working large open area. At which point they themselves put the focus on the lack of people in these areas.
If Cyberpunk had been a medium~large set of dioramas coupled with an actually fully staffed and modelled building you live in - these are described as cities onto themselves after all! - then it could have been far more impressive, letting the player's mind fill in the millions upon millions upon millions of people in all the other areas of the city they can only see in the distance, based on the hundreds that are immediately around them.
If Starfield had focused on just a handful of planets you visit in person, and only a dozen individual - but in themselves open and pretty big! - spots to walk around in, it could have sold the idea of a sprawling and open universe that merely abstracts away having to model billions of people based on gameplay abstractions, not lack of technical capabilities.
Open world can be really annoying to me in this regard. Breaks my immersion if someone does it. Have a narrative reason your world is dead and empty if you want an open world, or just don't do it and provide tight narrative environments your dev team got the resources to actually implement!
I feel like they could have just done a better job segmenting planets. New Atlantis shouldn't have a chest high wall surrounding it with empty plains beyond. It should be the port hub of a major planet. Explain that the port is walled off as they don't want to cross contaminate ecosystems. On the other side of the wall you could have an inaccessible cityscape. Do some variation of this for all the major cities. Neon gets a pretty weak pass as I imagine it to basically be an oil rig platform. They could have just copy pasted some more inaccessible ones in the distance.
I've also hated how most of the artifact and temple locations seem to be visual distance from some massive mining operation or mini settlements. Nobody thought, "wow, those floating rocks look cool, I should go look at them". It's so immersion breaking that Constellation is supposed to be exploring the frontier and seeing a way point to a settlement 700m away from a temple.
I've thought way too much about the obvious temple thing. My best excuse is that since you have to have discovered an artifact in order to gain the power, the door likely won't work for anyone who hasn't done the same. So for most people it's a cool gravitational anomaly like others seen in game, but no real indication that there's anything cool inside (or even that there is an inside).
That’s something that I’ve considered as well. But many of the temples look like buildings with floating stuff around them. Skyrim did a better job of this by having the ruins be obvious but having the secret entrance be revealed by magic or some other requirement. In Starfield, we start the game in a mining camp and get a portable laser that can cut through rock to harvest minerals that we carry the rest of the game, nobody else decided to cut open the door or just break down a wall at the cool floating rock building?
I’m enjoying the game, but I find I have to turn off my brain to enjoy some of it.