It is not yet known when it will be published, but for five years it has inflamed the fantasies of millions of gamers: it is called Starfield and promises, on an unspecified day in 2023, to bring space exploration to life like never before, at least with a joypad in hand. . Its announcement dates back to 2018, when at E3 in Los Angeles it aroused applause as it was the first new intellectual property, in 25 years, of Bethesda Games Studio, the creators of videogame anthology franchises such as Doom, Skyrim and Wolfenstein. Not only that: due to two postponements, Starfield should be Bethesda’s first game exclusively for Microsoft platforms after the acquisition, by the Redmond giant, of the ZeniMax group (holding company owned by Bethesda) for 7.5 billion dollars. , which took place in 2020.
The reasons why Starfield is the most talked about videogame of the moment go beyond the boundaries of the business: with ten minutes of gameplay, its preview monopolized the showcase of Microsoft and Bethesda a couple of days ago. Thanks to a graphic design lavish with wonders – difficult to distinguish it from a cinematic blockbuster – and to a rigorous role-playing approach, a feature that added to the spatial setting and the wide possibility of configuring characters, equipment and vehicles – building spaceships, or outposts – could translate into the deepest extra-terrestrial life simulator in gamer’s memory.
“The broader and more ambitious game” of Bethesda – so they say – will allow you to move in first and third person in and out of customizable spaceships, will implement the combat sequences with the gravitational physics of the thousand exoplanets foreseen, will allow you to visit colonies and accumulate resources tracked outside the Solar System, where in the fictional fiction Starfield tracks the vanguard of our species (in 2330). It is in this latter aspect – as well as in the decidedly terrestrial skirmishes – that Starfield demonstrates how much gaming today is prophetic: that the expansion, including commercial, of human activities is beyond the sky, is confirmed by the growth of the space economy and the horde of space billionaires led by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. That the latter, exactly like the creator of the Japanese cult anime Gundam, was inspired by the work of a physicist of the seventies – the Gerard O’Neill of Human colonies in space – should reiterate an old habit of science fiction: to translate, sooner or later, into reality. At one point, Starfield showed the wreckage of the Nasa Opportunity rover, launched on Mars in 2003: it is already a memory of the future.
