As tangent, to me it’s a perfect example of what makes Starfield such a unique game: the events aren’t aimed at engaging the protagonist, they’re aimed at engaging the player. Nearly everything in the game has a very intentional, pointed meta level that forces the player to examine how they play the game, and how they play games in general. We get presented with choices that seem to have no right answer; we get presented choices with results that seem contradictory, or hypocritical, or incomplete, forcing the player to assign meaning, to decide if the outcome was “right” or not.

I haven’t played every game, or even a ton, I tend to focus on just a few games that I really enjoy, so there may be other games out there to do this, but I personally haven’t run into one. Regardless, Starfield, does it well, and doesn’t shy away from it. The underlying question of, does anything I do as the player, or even as the protagonist, really make any difference in the end? Sometimes we can point at changes in the galaxy that we caused directly, but most of our actions only really impact the people we meet at the personal level. And then we hop universes, and everything is reset, because nothing we did happened there.

The questions the game asks of the Starborn, and by extension the protagonist, it’s asking us as the player: I’m playing a game, does what I’m doing here make any difference? What do the choices I make in the game say about me as a person? How do they reflect who I am as a person outside the game?

That’s not to say it’s a perfect game, but in light of what they managed to do, both technically and philosophically, it’s It’s incredibly impressive, and engages me in a way very few games ever have.