(It’s also playable on PC.) Microsoft has suffered from a dearth of triple-A console exclusives (which was compounded by Bethesda-published Redfall’s flop in May), and the company is counting on Starfield to be the centerpiece of a first-party resurgence. In 2020, Microsoft spent $7.5 billion to acquire Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media, partly to ensure that Starfield would appear on Xbox instead of PlayStation. The most recent games developed by Bethesda, 2018’s Fallout ’s The Elder Scrolls: Blades, were poorly received, though the reportedly mismanaged Fallout improved after its launch. The maker of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls has harbored sci-fi ambitions since the ’90s, and Starfield itself has been in the works for a while: Its title was trademarked 10 years ago, and it’s been in development for most of that decade. For one thing, it’s the first original IP developed by Bethesda in 25 years. The expectations and stakes for Starfield could hardly be higher. Unlike Starfield’s obliging NPCs, the infinite and finite, and the miraculous and mundane, don’t always make cooperative companions. In Starfield, an ambitious scale and scope meet the constraints of technology, interactivity, and players’ and developers’ time. Whitman’s wandering, wondering narrator would probably find a lot to like about Bethesda’s mammoth new game, but he’d also find a fair amount that would frustrate him. Yet I’ve also seen them in charts and diagrams while plotting countless courses in some of Starfield’s many menus. I’ve seen them in space, from the bridges of several ships and the view ports of scattered space stations. (I have a hard drive full of screenshots to prove it.) I’ve gazed at them from the ground, like Whitman’s narrator-not just in the mystical moist night air, but on moons and planets with no air at all. ![]() I’ve spent plenty of time staring at the stars in Starfield. As the speaker listens to a lecture by an acclaimed astronomer, he becomes “tired and sick.” And so, seeking relief from proofs and figures, charts and diagrams, he “wander’d off by myself / In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” In a certain safe, in a certain city, on a certain planet, in a certain system, while on a certain side quest in Starfield, Bethesda’s new sci-fi RPG, I found a copy of Walt Whitman’s poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” The eight-line poem, first published in 1865, conveys Whitman’s preference for a romantic, experiential, naturalistic communion with the wonders of the universe.
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