It's been a long time coming, but Starfield is finally around the corner. Players got their best look at the upcoming game during the Xbox Game Showcase, where Bethesda's Starfield Direct was positioned as the main event. The showcase offered Bethesda fans a deep dive into all aspects of the game, including Starfield's story, factions, weapons, combat, companions, skill trees, character customization, planets, base building, ship design, space flight, and more.
Among the content Bethesda showed off during the event was an odd encounter with another starship whose crew seemed surprised to find other humans out in space. This might seem weird, considering that the humans of Starfield's galaxy have been traveling between stars for quite some time. However, this segment appears to depict Starfield's player character encountering a generation ship, which may have significant implications in Bethesda's upcoming game.
Starfield's Slow Space Travelers
In settings without faster-than-light travel, a ship can take decades or centuries to go from one star system to another. One sci-fi solution is to freeze the colonists in cryogenic stasis, as was the case with the SM Flores from Square Enix's Outriders. The other answer is what's called a generation ship, a mostly self-sufficient spacecraft where multiple generations of colonists are born, live, and die on the way to where the ship is going.
That isn't necessarily what's going on with the ship players will encounter in Starfield. However, that seems to be the case based on the ten-second segment during the Spaceflight section of the nearly hour-long Starfield Direct video. Fans who want a refresher can find the relevant section at the video's 29:20 mark. If nothing else, the crew of the ECS Constant has been in space long enough that the entirety of human interstellar civilization happened without them. It's hard to give an exact number without a clear timeline of Starfield's universe, but a century or two seems likely.
Examples of this trope show up in the backstory of the Homeworld series of RTS games, Bungie's original Marathon from 1994, and derelict wrecks in Elite Dangerous. However, while other examples exist, it's far from the default in science fiction and especially rare in games. This is part of what makes it exciting that Bethesda decided to feature one in Starfield.
The idea of the rest of humanity outrunning this generation ship is also interesting. It makes a lot of sense considering the century or more of technological advancement, and has a lot of narrative potential. Weird things can happen when a society is isolated for that long, and they could have developed a few unusual quirks. Meanwhile, the advent of Starfield's Gravity Drives makes it possible that someone else beat the Constant to its destination, creating conflict between the two groups of colonists.
This ship could also be an exciting way to flesh out Starfield's backstory. While Mars is an important mining world for the United Colonies, Earth seems abandoned. If the Constant was the first ship to leave Earth, its inhabitants might share something interesting about what the planet was like shortly before humanity left it for good. Meanwhile, even if the destination is uninhabited, something must have been special about it to have made the expedition worthwhile.
Of course, this colony ship is still just a side quest, or at most, the equivalent of a village in Skyrim or a small town in Fallout 4. Therefore, while it might be a memorable encounter, Starfield players should manage their expectations. Still, the concept has a lot of potential that developers could take advantage of, and it will be interesting to see where the studio goes with it. After all, the ship probably wouldn't have made it into the Direct if Bethesda didn't want players to go looking for it.
Starfield launches for PC and Xbox Series X/S on September 6th, 2023.