Starfield has a lot to live up to. It’s Bethesda’s first new IP in well over two decades, and if the game releasing exactly eleven years after Skyrim’s November 11 release date wasn’t enough, Todd Howard was also sure to describe it as “Skyrim in space.”
One of the main comparisons made between Starfield and Skyrim so far has been the new game’s faction system. Like Skyrim, Starfield will have multiple factions the player can join across its universe. So far only one of them has been revealed—Constellation, the space exploration organization that appears to be the focus of the main questline. Bethesda may be trying to draw favorable comparisons between Starfield and Skyrim, but the studio needs to avoid making some of the same mistakes with Starfield's factions that it made with Skyrim's.
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Skyrim's Factions
Skyrim is full of faction-based questlines. There’s the Thieves Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, the Companions, the College of Winterhold, and each side of Skyrim’s Civil War. The Dawnguard DLC added the Volkihar vampire clan and the eponymous Dawnguard itself. There are also smaller groups like the Bards College, but the blurry lines between what is a faction and what is just another questline already begins to point to one of the problems with Skyrim's factions.
The factions in Skyrim’s base game don’t actually change the landscape of the province very much. Outside of the Skyrim Civil War, these factions aren’t vying for power, and while the player can restore the Thieves Guild, the Skyrim chapter of the Dark Brotherhood, and the College of Winterhold to their former glory this doesn’t actually have any implications for the world at large.
The factions are mainly just launching points for questlines, rather than actual players on Skyrim’s political stage in any meaningful way. Even completing the Civil War questline for the Stormcloaks or the Imperials only leads to a few small changes. A handful of Jarls are replaced, some of the guards look different, but beyond that very little changes.
Open-World Ecosystems
The lack of impact each of Skyrim's factions has doesn't mean that each one of Starfield’s factions should have the capacity to conquer the galaxy with the player’s help. Instead, Bethesda needs to find ways to make its factions feel like part of a more believable and immersive ecosystem. The fact that the Dragonborn can be the Archmage of the College of Winterhold and then get kidnapped by the Dark Brotherhood without being able to bring their position up—or have Astrid mention it—is a massive oversight for a game with only a few major factions.
The idea that the player can be both the Listener of the Dark Brotherhood and the leader of the Thieves Guild without anyone ever bringing it up is strange. The fact that they can assassinate the Emperor of Tamriel without it affecting the Civil War is absurd. All it would take is a few extra lines of dialogue here and there to make Skyrim’s faction system far more immersive.
Part of the problem is that Skyrim’s faction questlines often have similar arcs. In the case of the Dark Brotherhood, the Thieves’ Guild, and the College of Winterhold quests, the player ends up becoming the leader of the faction after the death of its original leader despite also being the most recent recruit. On top of that, becoming the leader of a major faction has almost no implications for the Dragonborn. The fact that the player can become the leader of so many factions without anyone batting an eye is one of the most immersion-breaking aspects of the game that most players run into after completing several major questlines.
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Improving Starfield's Factions
There are a few ways Starfield could ensure that its faction system stays true to the freedom-oriented philosophy of Skyrim while still feeling like a significant improvement. For a start, the game needs to acknowledge the player’s reputation with its various factions outside of those factions’ questlines. Skyrim has a few guard comments, but little else.
If the player is a high-ranking member of Constellation and approaches another faction, they should be recognized or able to identify themself as such. Each faction shouldn’t feel self-contained. They should all feel like part of a single world. Fallout: New Vegas’ faction system addresses this to some degree. Wearing the clothes of a member of any of New Vegas’ factions will at least change the reaction other factions have towards the player, though usually only between immediate hostility or total neutrality.
Approaching a faction of traders in Starfield as a member of an assassin faction should draw awe, hostility, or perhaps even an offer of work. Approaching a faction of space pirates as a wealthy member of a trader guild should see those pirates smell opportunity in the air, trying to take the player captive or making a deal with them for smuggled goods. Skyrim’s faction stories only really make sense as totally isolated narratives. What Starfield needs to do to take things to the next level is allow players to have multiple connected relationships with its factions that make sense as the player's single, consistent story.
Although it will take effort, in theory, the way to make Starfield’s faction system far more interesting than Skyrim’s is simple. There needs to be more unique dialogue and perhaps even quests that pop up and factor in the player’s relationship with the different factions. Storylines involving opposing factions should have more possible endings than simply the annihilation of one and ascendance of the other. Factions that don’t oppose one another should still be able to interact in some way, and most importantly the player’s actions on behalf of each faction need to be acknowledged by the others.
That’s easier said than done, but it will be vital if Starfield is going to feel like the generational lead forward from Skyrim that Bethesda is eager to market it as. Hopefully, some of the studio’s references to Starfield being a more hardcore RPG than recent Bethesda games will mean that the variety of dialogue options and NPC reactions are greater than past projects.
Starfield releases November 11, 2022 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
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