Cutscenes

Sure, we make fun of cutscenes. Especially the un-skippable ones that you end up having to watch multiple times.

But as I've got Starfield to sort-of running, enough to where I can actually somewhat immerse in the game (bad mechanics, and a ridiculous number of loading screens continue to get in the way), I am thinking about why the universe feels so dead and the lore isn't there.

It is tempting to lump on Creation Engine but I think this may be a design choice. The latest Starfield beta allows turning off the dialogue camera. That means you don't have to stay locked into looking at the talking head.

But this still isn't an character-animated dialogue. Which is time-consuming; one of the reasons Mass Effect Andromeda got meme'd is that they ran out of time and money for full animation and had to auto-animate (and use canned poses) for a little too much of the dialogue.

There are a few camera shots in Starfield. The best is the take-off and landing -- which are un-skippable and play every time, but they at least give you a sense of actually, well, taking off and landing that the game otherwise wouldn't provide. Because otherwise it is all fast travel.

I went for the UC/Vanguard faction missions this time, ignoring as much as I could of the main quest. And that thread gives you early on the backstory to a universe of war, now in a temporary and fragile peace.

Poorly. Really poorly. These are two-color posters with a voice talking over them. I went through the entire museum-worth of displays and at the end of it I still couldn't tell you who the Varuun are and how many times the UC and the Freestar Collective fought.

This game could really use some cinematics. Not necessarily to explain the back story. But to get you in the mood, to set the stage. About an hour in to Mass Effect there's a sort of fly-by to The Citadel, a hub location for most of the game and a key place in the plot that will unfold. And it really builds it up and gives you an idea of how this universe works.

Thing is, you can do this without having to move the camera. The Half-Life series proved master in establishing key ideas without even taking over the camera; just letting natural cues direct the player's eyes. For that matter, Fallout 4 manages to set the stage and give you a real feel for this new world by letting you interact with the before-bomb world, letting you see one of the bombs, then letting you discover the ruins of the place you saw only minutes ago (from your point of view, both character and player).

And in that same Creation Engine, Skyrim briefly takes command of the camera to show off the dragon that kicks off the plot proper.

So let's separate spectacle from the ability to show, not tell. Spectacle is something Starfield could have used. It feels too small. It rarely feels like you are actually in space. Sure, you are actually in a series of small disconnected rooms that you have to fast-travel between, but so is Hogwart's Castle, or many, many other game worlds. They just do a better job of establishing that idea of a bigger whole before they sit you down to play only tiny bits of it at a time.

Starfield starts you in a mine. You zap through fast-travel -- aka blank loading screens -- and the best vista you get is what you can see from the ground of the city of New Atlantis. Compare this to, say, almost anything. The incredible opening cutscene of Horizon Zero Dawn. The chase scene in Cyberpunk 2077 that introduces you to Night City.

So, no spectacle. But they also blew it on the show don't tell. Mostly. Pretty much everything you learn about the world of Starfield is told to you. Sometimes off terminals, just as often delivered as an info-dump by an Animatronic American President of a Bethesda unprompted dialogue. "We are called the Freestar Collective, we had a war, the war was terrible."

Seriously. You could SEE a ship with the emblem or patches. Meet people hurt in the war. That sort of thing. Which you do, but when it has already been delivered this badly...

Even if you break a whole bunch of rules -- and Mass Effect is far from a recent game, either -- it can set the look and feel of the game, explain key elements of the universe and back story, and get your emotions in gear for what will follow.

Sure, it is traditional to start one of the Elder Scrolls game in jail. But Starfield starts you in a cave and, sorry, that box of scraps is just not enough.

Worth pointing out, in both of those opening cinematics, that they use your customized character. Who is fully voiced, also unlike Starfield. Shepard has a variety of possible backstories and, yes, Anderson and Udina will refer to them while debating whether he or she is the person they want. So these are not just showing you the world of the game; they are showing you "you" in the world of the game.

Starfield, probably because you are not a voiced protagonist, backlides from Fallout 4, which were usually shot-reverse-shot so you would generally see your character's face when they were speaking. Since there's no recorded dialogue for Starfield, you only get the one shot; staring at the NPC. I struggle to think of where in the game you actually see your own character's face, except perhaps the extremely long third-person animation when you get up from the pilot's couch after a "flight."