Starfield's anticipation continues to mount as its early 2023 release draws closer. The first new IP for Bethesda Game Studios in 25 years, Starfield represents director and executive producer Todd Howard's vision built over at least a decade. Howard and his team have created a world that looks naturally evolved from real life with the theme of understanding what's out in space, and humanity's role among the stars.
Howard wants players to create their own immersion, embracing traditional RPG elements rather than forcing them into restricted stories. Set in 2310, the Settled Systems are light-years from Earth with hundreds of star systems and over 1,000 planets, across which players will meet various factions, mercenaries, pirates, explorers, and corporations that have their own agendas. While these ideologies beg to be explored, Starfield must be mindful to avoid mimicking some aspects, especially among its corporations, from The Outer Worlds.
Corporations in The Outer Worlds
The Outer Worlds from Obsidian Entertainment is a successful RPG in its own right, also occurring hundreds of years in the future when humanity has colonized the stars. While The Outer Worlds is a smaller-scale game compared to Starfield, there are overlapping elements. The game's setting is the Halcyon System, a place proudly advertised as wholly owned by corporations.
The Halcyon Holdings Corporate Board, or simply The Board - ten CEOs of the system's founding companies - control governance, laws, and religion throughout Halcyon. Throughout the game, it becomes increasingly evident that The Board only cares about profits. Food shortages, disease, corporate conspiracies, mutated wildlife, and blissful ignorance exist beneath the system's shiny facade as The Board tricks its colonists into believing that breaks, time off, and weekend reprieves are detrimental to success and morale.
In short, The Outer Worlds depicts corporations as controlling every factor within the colony, viewing their colonists as fodder to keep machines running. With only the capital Byzantium viewed as worth saving, The Board devises ways of rewarding unsuspecting colonists with peaceful Early Retirement - being brutally massacred by auto mechanicals. Presented through satirical humor, corporations in The Outer Worlds are the money-grubbing villains who oppress society.
Corporations in Starfield
While corporations will play a role in Starfield, with several dozen mentioned or previewed on character creation screens, their overall position has yet to be defined. Since Howard has ensured the game is grounded in realism, taking an evolutionary approach to how current systems will advance in the future, their roles should have some prominence. For example, fans noticed in character backgrounds that players can begin the game with a starter house and mortgage owned by GalBank.
The presence of interstellar banks hint that some institutions may be foundational pillars in the Settled Systems governing through some aspect of law. Through character creation and background menus, different corporations appear to primarily relate to manufactured equipment, spaceships, defense systems, and other aspects of surviving in space. Players have noted entities like Argos Extractors, Axion Energy TEC, KFactor, Lunar Robotics, Ryujin Industries, and Tranquilitea.
This puts Starfield in an excellent place to avoid similarities with The Outer Worlds. By keeping the majority of corporations rooted in manufacturing and engineering, Starfield can bypass the idea that they are monopolies or significant conglomerates that control every part of life. That's not to say some can't be influential or representative of corporate greed, but limiting their oversight helps set this game world apart. Instead, much of Starfield's governance seems dictated by factions.
Factions in Starfield
Rather than using corporations to control the Settled Systems, Howard and his team have detailed how numerous factions flesh out the explorable worlds. The player character will begin as a member of Constellation, a group whose aims are to explore the Milky Way. Whether players remain in Constellation or join other factions, they will encounter the two opposing factions at the heart of the Settled Systems: the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective.
Existing in a Cold War state, these factions will pull at the player. Utilizing classic RPG elements and player agency, choices and their consequences stemming from these groups will continue to open up the universe. However, Howard has also claimed that players can join other factions to suit their play style. This will lead to various endings that emphasize player choice. Some of these factions have been named, but many more may present themselves:
- Constellation
- United Colonies
- Freestar Collective
- Crimson Fleet
- Ryujin Industries
- SysDef
- Xenofresh Corporation
With some corporations such as GalBank, Ryujin Industries, and Xenofresh Corporation presented as factions themselves, players can expect corporate influence to leave a mark on different worlds. However, these corporations and factions appear to have competition among themselves, if not all-out warfare; which successfully avoids parallels to The Outer Worlds. While Outer World corporations competed, their cohesion as The Board set the rule of law.
Starfield is looking to be a complex and heavily populated experience with player choices to explore. The game world has shown that corporations will be an ever-present factor in the future, similar to their presence today. While similarities exist between Starfield and The Outer Worlds, Starfield's current trajectory featuring manufactured, competing entities and factions avoids the same setup where corporations as a single entity, The Board, control every aspect of life.
Starfield releases in 2023 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.