Highlights
- One Starfield player’s attempt at rescuing an NPC had a hilariously tragic ending when the NPC walked into their crosshairs and died to friendly fire.
- Fans are using this incident as evidence of a problem with Starfield’s NPC AI, referencing similar issues in Fallout 4 and urging Bethesda to address this shortcoming.
- While Bethesda may not officially tweak the character AI, modders may take it upon themselves to fix the NPCs’ reckless habits in Starfield.
One Starfield player’s recent attempt at an NPC rescue had a disastrously hilarious ending. The footage of their tragicomic experience made the rounds on social media shortly after Starfield entered early access on September 1.
While much has already been said about the fact that Starfield uses procedural generation to populate its hundreds of planets, it bears repeating that the game doesn’t do so entirely on the fly. For example, each planet features the same topography for every player, but most also offer a variety of handcrafted locations. Dynamic procedural generation only comes into play while exploring some of Starfield’s less content-packed areas because the game will automatically create points of interest (POIs) if there are none in the player’s immediate vicinity in order to consistently reward exploration.
While investigating one such POI on the Procyon 3 planet in the Procyon A star system, Reddit user sprinklep0p encountered a survivor of a radio tower attack who asked for help reaching his spacecraft in order to escape. The NPC said the ship was close by, but the escort mission ended up taking longer than the player anticipated. After the duo finally reached the spacecraft following a 10-minute walk, the survivor turned to thank the player, only for their conversation to be cut short by a Hunting Shieldshell enemy. And though the Starfield player was quick to react to the attack, their attempt at downing the giant crab-like creature had a hilariously tragic end after the NPC walked right into their crosshairs, consequently dying to friendly fire.
While many fans reacting to the newly shared clip expressed amusement at the failed rescue attempt, others used the footage as evidence that Starfield’s NPCs have a problem with steering clear of the player’s line of fire, claiming they themselves have had similarly frustrating experiences with accidentally killing or provoking reckless characters. Some such fan criticism recalled how NPCs in Bethesda’s last single-player RPG, Fallout 4, had the exact same lack of self-preservation instincts, arguing that it’s high time for the studio to address this glaring shortcoming with its AI.
While the developer historically supported its AAA titles with a plethora of patches, those were historically aimed at addressing game-breaking bugs and crashes, not systemic issues stemming from the way it went about implementing things like NPC AI. And though Bethesda’s space-faring RPG is hence unlikely to receive any official tweaks to its character AI, that’s not to say that some of the Starfield modders preparing to fix the game won’t get around to tackling its NPCs’ reckless habits.
Starfield launches September 6 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
