It’s the story of three behemoths setting out to conquer the stars. On the one hand, a cult saga for over forty years. On the other, a project started ten years ago, whose fundraising and slow development have become a subject of jokes in the industry. And in the center, a thirty-year-old studio known for its RPG series and shooting games. In the world of video games, 2023 was placed under the sign of space exploration. A central theme in the Jedi: Fallen Order from Star Wars, the MMORPG Star Citizen and Bethesda’s new title, Starfieldwhich was officially released this Wednesday.
All main quest Starfield revolves around this theme, since “the protagonist will join a group of explorers” made up of “the last people to push the limits of the universe and what we know”, explains Hadrien Cheru, marketing manager at Bethesda France . And the stars, both visible on a daily basis but so distant and inaccessible, had something to tickle the imagination and the desire to explore of the players.
Of Galactic Empire has Outer Wilds
However, the discovery of other planets is not new in video games. In 1980, at the very moment when the famous “I am your father” resounded in cinemas for the first time, the first gamers set out to conquer the galaxy in Galactic Empire. For Olivier Sanguy, space news manager at the Cité de l’Espace in Toulouse, “space has always interested part of the population”, but has experienced “waves of interest”. “In France, Thomas Pesquet’s two missions served to reset this interest,” he explains.
In the video game, this gave the license Mass Effectthen the titles Endless Space And FTL in 2012. Then came, one after the other, Interstellar And Alone on Mars on the cinema side, Kerbral Space Program, Stellaris And No Man’s Sky on the video game side, between 2014 and 2016. Latest video game gems to date, Outer Wilds And Astroneer share the poster in 2019, and Ad Astrainspiration material from the developers of Starfield, was released in theaters the same year. All, in their own way, offer to “participate in a fictional way” in the discovery of other worlds.
The stars, so near and so far
Because if the passion is present among the general public, “space has something frustrating”, for Olivier Sanguy: taking part in the adventure is “extremely difficult, it is a field still seen as elitist”. Faced with the extremely small number of people who go into space each year, video games represent the ideal solution to respond to this frustration. In Starfield, after character creation, it only takes a good hour of play to be able to leave the tracks of the main quest and find yourself free to go almost wherever you want in space. “Very quickly, the player can say to himself ‘what happens if I choose to land in such and such a place on such and such a planet?’, the strength of the game is to respond to this need for imagination,” develops Hadrien Cheru.
Because exploration, Bethesda knows how to do. In the elders scrolls where the fallout, the player was already spending his time scouring the map for neat details and navigating between radically different towns and environments. “It’s a very strong theme” for the studio, confirms Hadrien Cheru. It remained to apply it to space. From Star Wars, the discovery of a new planet or a satellite often comes down to the vision of a single biome: Endor and its infinite forest, Hoth covered in ice, Kamino the ocean planet. So many monolithic surfaces “influenced by our solar system”, according to Olivier Sanguy.
Indeed, around the Sun, it is on Earth that we find “the greatest diversity of geology, fauna and flora”. But she is familiar to us. On the other hand, otherness, and therefore the unknown, the distance, is “Venus, 400°C on the surface, quite monotonous, the Moon, which seems uniform to neophytes, Mars the same”, even if scientists know its richness and subtleties and that “the monolithic vision is a limit of our knowledge”. Starfieldwhere exploration is sometimes more a subject than an experience, gets around the problem in its own way: from the spatial view, certain planets reveal continents, oceans, icy poles, but you can only land there in areas corresponding to certain archetypes (abandoned mine and rocky surface, scientific outpost surrounded by short vegetation).
Fortunately, sometimes imagination surpasses knowledge. In 1977, when Tatooine appeared in the first Star Wars, orbiting a double star, “we classified it as science fiction. It was only years later that we discovered a stable system around a double star” in real life, says Olivier Sanguy. “There is a back and forth between reality and fiction,” he smiles. Among the 1,000 planets offered Starfieldis there one that astronomers will one day observe?