History VideoGame / Starfield

* NeverBringAKnifeToAGunfight: Melee combat in ''Starfield'' is practically suicide. 90+% of humanoid enemies wield firearms, and the various alien critters that attack in melee are ''much'' better at it than you can ever hope to be. To make matters worse, melee weapons can't be upgraded at all and only have a single basic tier, giving them pathetic damage output compared to anything but the most basic starter guns. And to put icing on the cake, the Spacefarer's very slow, non-improvable movement speed while sneaking (slower than [=NPCs=]' walking speed) makes sneak melee attacks highly impractical despite the potentially massive damage multiplier granted by the associated perk.

* NominalImportance: The vast majority of [=NPCs=] in the game are reffered to generically, like "Citizen", "Miner", "Colonist", etc. The odds are good that if an NPC has a name, they will be involved with a mission somewhere at some point.

* {{Planetville}}:
** No planet has more than one major settlement. While you can explore outside of that settlement, it's all wilderness and things like outposts, mines, labs, etc.
** Lopez in the "Failure to Communicate" quest is a farmer who's unhappy with getting some new neighbors. The neighbors in question: other farms on ''other moons in the solar system''. Lopez has only occupied a tiny part of his own moon, and he still complains that "this was my system first!"

* OldSchoolDogfight: The vast majority of space combat consists of a handful of small to medium-sized, individually piloted spaceships duking it out with [[FixedForwardFacingWeapon Fixed Forward-Facing Weapons]] at close range like old-school combat aircraft. Auto-targeting gun turrets exist, but the fact that they can only shoot at random targets in range without any prioritization or other tactical settings means most ship designers prefer to focus their firepower forwards regardless.

** Enemies will always attack your character [[TheComputerShallTauntYou and, among non-alien humans, will keep taunting you in almost endlessly annoying fashion]] regardless of level and equipment quality and never seem to retreat except in ground combat where they will occasionally, but rarely run away to a safe spot if they've taken enough damage without being killed. This is played straight in spaceship combat where they don't seem programmed to jump away when their ship has taken enough damage without being destroyed. It's somewhat justified in that once their gravitic drive has been temporarily disabled, they cannot retreat and jump away from combat and are forced to fight to the death.

* ThemeNaming: Invoked at the New Homestead colony on Titan, where citizens adopt as their family name the name of the Earth city their ancestors originally came from. With New Homestead being primarily a museum dedicated to Earth's history, it's one of their methods to keep mankind's heritage alive.

* TheComputerShallTauntYou: Hostile [=NPCs=] love to do this to you in combat, whether on ground or over the comms in space.

** Much like in ''Fallout 3'' and ''New Vegas'', the "foolhardy" AI parameter exists in the game's engine that dictate the AI to completely ignore an enemy's strength regardless of the disparity in level. And almost every faction and alien NPC seems to have this trait, meaning they will often charge at you with reckless abandon even if they're outmatched. While this is justified with Va'ruun Zealots, whose fanatical devotion to their serpent deity causes them to attack anyone outside of their religion, it's less excusable with the Spacers, Ecliptic Mercenaries, and the Crimson Fleet pirates unless they're possibly taking drugs and alcohol to attack anyone that isn't them, which is a plausible reason for their suicidally reckless behavior.

** Enemies will always attack your character regardless of level and equipment quality and never seem to retreat except in ground combat where they will occasionally, but rarely run away to a safe spot if they've taken enough damage without being killed. This is played straight in spaceship combat where they don't seem programmed to jump away when their ship has taken enough damage without being destroyed. It's somewhat justified in that once their gravitic drive has been temporarily disabled, they cannot retreat and jump away from combat and are forced to fight to the death.

** Also connected to the AL-Physics section: given how completely the Water Cycle and biosphere collapsed on Earth, the utter lack of fossils on what remains of the planet is glaring. Given billions of humans were abandoned, along with virtually all other species, at bare minimum the planet should be teeming with fossils and dead vegetation. And more likely, it should be a horrorscape of freeze-dried, partially-decayed flesh and vegetation. Instead, the only evidence to be found that Earth ''ever'' hosted life of any kind is an odd fungus in a cave near one of the few ruins the developers bothered to throw in.

** The Ruyjin plotline basically is an extended shout out to ''VideoGame/{{Syndicate}}'', with you working for a corporation as an operative doing illegal things in a cyberpunk setting (which Neon comes the closest to), and features a piece of technology that allows you to compel people to do things for you, much like Syndicate's Persuadotron.

** The ship designs of Nova Galactic are very reminiscent of the Terran United Space Command spacecraft from the ''VideoGame/{{X}}'' games. Likewise, the ship designs from Deimos Staryards Inc. are reminiscent of the spacecraft flown by the [=AGI=] Task Force.

** We never learn the identity of [[spoiler:the Pilgrim, a Starborn who came into the current universe centuries prior seeking an understanding of the Unity and impacting the setting's three major religions (Sanctum Universum, Enlightened, and Va'ruun)]].

** The Vanguard quest chain unlocks ship parts after the second mission. One of these is the Vanguard Obliterator Autoprojector particle cannon. This deals high and equal damage to shields and hulls and uses only two bars of ship power per gun. It's more efficient than almost anything else you can load onto a ship at ''any'' level and four of the guns will take down most shields in seconds. It continues to hold up well against B-class particle autoprojector gun modelss and is only outclassed by C-class models.

** The Vanguard quest chain unlocks ship parts after the second mission. One of these is the Vanguard Obliterator Autoprojector particle cannon. This deals high and equal damage to shields and hulls and uses only two bars of ship power per gun. It's more efficient than almost anything else you can load onto a ship at ''any'' level and four of the guns will take down most shields in seconds. It continues to hold up well against B-class particle autoprojector guns and is only outclassed by C-class autoprojectors.

** The Vanguard quest chain unlocks ship parts after the second mission. One of these is the Obliterator Autoprojector particle cannon. This deals high and equal damage to shields and hulls and uses only two bars of ship power per gun. It's more efficient than almost anything else you can load onto a ship at ''any'' level and four of the guns will take down most shields in seconds.

* SpaceCompression: At work as usual for a Bethesda games. ''Starfield'' features the largest cities seen since ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind Morrowind]]'' and feature generic citizens to pad the civilian numbers. That said, each city is still positively minuscule for how big they should be in the lore. Even New Atlantis, the setting's largest city, feature maybe at most 5 skyscrapers in which civilians resides, far from a metropolis home to the largest population in the Settled Systems. UC as a whole counts 4 major settlements[[note]]New Atlantis, Cydonia, Gagarin, New Homestead. And the last three are explicitly smaller and on the downslide.[[/note]] yet somehow makes up about a third to half of the human race. Akila City meanwhile, the capital of the Freestar Collective counts maybe two dozen one or two story buildings and is moderately larger than a major city in ''Skyrim''.

* SpaceIsCold: It's a plot point that a particular supercomputer was built on the moon because it is "colder" there, making for better cooling; and they mention building it in space if that didn't work. This isn't, of course, how temperatures work; with no air to carry away heat, their supercomputer ought to have more heat problems on the moon, not less.

* LightningBruiser: C-class starships start off fitting the mold of {{Might Glacier}}s, being the biggest, toughest, and having the most power out of the ship classes while being inherently slower and less agile than smaller ones. However, it is very possible, even easy, to design a fairly large C-class ship that has perfect or near-perfect Mobility while crew and skill bonuses can push its top speed over 200. The Bruiser part comes from access to C-class weapons and shield generators which are the most powerful in the game, and even after those are accounted for the ship should have enough spare maneuvering thrust to add large capacities for fuel and cargo before Mobility starts dropping below 100.[[note]]All of this assumes that C-class engines are used, which have the lowest top speed of 130 but provide by far the most maneuvering thrust. Using lower-grade engines would result in slightly higher top speed but very poor mobility due to less maneuvering thrust.[[/note]]

* CanadaEh: "Can-uck!" (a play on Canuck) is a brand of food items with a stereotypical Canadian theme, their packaging featuring giant maple leaves. They sell mundane items like coffee but also more stereotypically Canadian items like poutine, bacon, tourtière, pouding chômeur, and maple syrup flavored soda.