Things have been getting a little weird on the Starfield subreddit recently—players assembling their own spaceships from paper-clipping style cutouts, others desperately trying to find spoons in gameplay trailers—but one staggering feat dropped on the front page yesterday that's left me speechless.
A user by the name of Gokamo has assembled a 1,000 page document on the game, titled: "An Attempted Complete Starfield Compendium, by Gokamo (god help me)". One might think an entire novel's worth of info on an unreleased game is overkill—but Gokamo's created a seriously impressive dive into Starfield's development lore, dating back to the game's reveal in 2018.
The compendium goes through several "arcs". The first arc alone covers the initial announcement 5 years ago, as well as some leaks, a ship customisation survey, the first episodes of "Into the Starfield", a Reddit Q&A from 2021, and more.
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The rest is a chronological archive of Starfield's long voyage through development deep space: concept art, more leaks, more trailers, more interviews and directs, coverage of skills and story aspects—it's basically all here. In a section named "Why type all this?" Gokamo goes into their inspiration.
"When Oblivion was released, my father got the prima strategy guide gifted to him [...] I remember flipping through that massive tome and being awed by the sheer amount of things and pictures it contained. When I finally was able to get out of the sewers, and was greeted with the view of ayleid ruins across a lake with that peaceful music playing, it felt unreal. It was the first game that felt like another world that truly existed."
"I've finished all of Bethesda’s games now since Morrowind, and there is an underlying formula there with all of them that make them feel special to me. [...] To say that I am a massive space geek would be an understatement, so a Bethesda game in space seemed like a wild unrealistic dream."
"For Fallout 4, I remember poring over pre-release information and making wildly inaccurate predictions. Those ideas are lost to time now, so for this game I wanted to catalogue how the community has been feeling on this entire journey."
This tome didn't just drop out of orbit and onto our laps—Gokamo's been working on it for at least a year, gradually adding more pages until they'd assembled the novel-sized archive we've been handed.
It's a smashingly detailed resource, and a heartwarming reminder of the impact that games can have on people's lives. It also makes me want Starfield to come out already so that poor Gokamo can take a break from all this compiling, and get out into the universe.
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