Since my review of 150 hours spent in Starfield at launch, my opinion on the game has only soured. The added survival mechanics were of fleeting interest to me, and there are a handful of neat mods to toy with. However, nothing I’ve heard of the game’s singular expansion since its 2023 release–from the inclusion of features beyond the marginally compelling ability to drive on each planet’s limited instances, to Bethesda’s attempt to charge us for pieces of a faction quest–fill me with a desire to make space on my cluttered storage devices for its mammoth 120-plus GB install size. So what I’m left with are the memories of those random moments where I did find some joy, mostly by taking in the starry sights. But now, seeing as I’ve completely lost access to hundreds of gigabytes of capture across its enormous galaxy, I’m wondering if those memories aren’t worth hanging onto anyway.
Read More: Starfield Isn’t Boring Actually, Bethesda Tells Steam Reviewers
In the nearly two years since its launch, I haven’t thought much about Starfield or the massive amount of capture I had until a friend told me he needed to clear space and thus deleted all of the videos. I then realized that I had likely done the same a few months ago, probably under some frantic attempt to make room on my ever-overflowing storage devices, during which I thought, “When the hell am I gonna sift through hours of Starfield footage?” But after learning the only other copies of these videos were trashed, and realizing I completely misplaced and lost the game’s photo mode folder, a rather strange quote sprang to mind from Bethesda’s managing director, Ashley Cheng, addressing early concerns that Starfield was bland:
“When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren’t bored.”
Look, if I took a trip to the actual barren, desolate surface of the moon and then lost 500 GB worth of capture from that trip, I think I’d be rather crestfallen. Hell, in the vast travels I took across the states, Canada, and a sliver of the UK in my 20s, I took tons of videos and photos that I haven’t looked at in many years, but I’d be really upset if I found they were just suddenly gone. In fact, I still think about things I saw that I regret not taking a picture of nearly a decade later.
Read More: Starfield: The Kotaku Review
It all brings to mind so much of the work Bethesda and Microsoft were doing in telling us this game was something special, instead of ever really showing it to us in the form of a compelling game. The emptiness was the point, apparently. But also, it would be “one of the most important RPGs ever made.” Todd Howard talked a big game about being an explorer, about finding things that no one else had seen before, and how that moment of discovery was something Starfield was designed to deliver.
Early on, I felt a need to be defensive of Starfield’s vast nothingness. I mean, I’m the girl who has John Cage’s “4:33” linked on my Tinder account as the one and only featured song. Visiting La Monte Young’s Dream House was a formative experience of my 20s. There are many video games that capture this spirit of stillness, of just being in awe of a visual spectacle that communicates a sense of place. But Starfield’s overabundance has failed to be one of them. Despite some fleetingly beautiful moments across its many worlds, not a single one of them felt precious enough for me to feel bad about losing the archival footage.
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