Here’s the rub: As far as video games go, players of all stripes have been there and back again, to the edge of our own galaxy and beyond. In my time playing Elite Dangerous, for instance, I’ve traveled more than 150,000 light years and visited nearly 3,000 star systems, personally discovering hundreds of new worlds. All it took me was three weeks of in-game time. The same can be said for fans of No Man’s Sky, a game also teeming with complex virtual life. But both of those games are, to a large extent, randomly generated. It’s all just disconnected bits of background fluff. The next step for gaming-kind, therefore, isn’t about the pixels or the frame rates. It’s about whipping that fluff into something more substantial, and telling a story that can genuinely inspire wonder.There are a few tidbits of Sunday’s trailer that have gone overlooked, I think — things that tell me that Bethesda is heading in the right direction.
While my eyes rolled out of my head at the lockpicking minigame and my stomach flipped when an up-armored astronaut started chucking grenades on an exoplanet, I gasped when I noticed that players will be free to choose their own in-game religion.
Raised Enlightened, an optional trait, is available to those who “grew up as a member of the Enlightened.” Raised Universal, on the other hand, notes that your character “grew up as a member of the Sanctum Universum.” Meanwhile, pan-galactic paganists seem to prefer the Serpent’s Embrace as they all “grew up worshipping the Great Serpent.” How these sub-factions and beliefs riff on existing religious and political views will be excellent fodder for critics and players alike, but they may also offer a foundation on which our individual human souls can get their footing in-game. With luck, that RPG footing could lead to some players even changing their perspective.
Howard said you can “be who you want and go where you want.” Maybe that means traveling in a spiritual sense as well. “The biggest question of all,” said one of the characters in the trailer, is “what’s out there.” But what you think is out there has a lot to do with what you see inside yourself. “Whatever lies at the end of this road will change humanity forever,” that same character said. Maybe it’ll change some hearts and minds about the space program as well.
Or it will fail miserably. The story will be garbage, its esoteric conclusions vented into an uncaring atmosphere filled with jaded, miserable Earthlings. That’s the real risk as I see it — not the quality of the base building, and not the depth of the weapon crafting. Will the game stir my soul? That’s not something I’ve been able to wonder about my GameStop pre-order in a long, long time.
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― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone), Tuesday, 14 June 2022 22:19 (one year ago) link