Tales from the Multiverse - Starfield

Downloads:

https://mega.nz/folder/h89kDZwR#rg5T3AhH19D2-kVSFaoUXw

Credits to:

Bethesda Softworks/Zenimax Media Inc.

Starfield

https://bethesda.net/en/game/starfield

Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Young Adult, LitRPG, Found Footage

Content warnings: Language, Blood, Violence, Partial Nudity, Drug and Alcohol Usage, Suggestive Themes.

Premise:

This is the story of a farm girl growing up on a once-peaceful world in the heart of the Settled Systems whose life is turned upside down shortly after she begins experiencing strange phenomena and vivid dreams. Accompanied by her faithful flying drone companion, Xenon, who also acts as the cameraman, the story is presented as found footage provided through a mysterious source who seems to have a special interest in her. As her adventure begins, she loosely follows along the events of the main Starfield storyline, though her motivations are her own and not directly connected to that plot - at least at first. Soon she discovers that many powerful figures in the dark corners of the universe are keen to get their hands on her, but their reasons are enigmatic and shrouded in secrecy, all the while discovering that there is something powerful inside her that she can barely control. Separated from her parents and forced to survive on her own, she must embrace these strange powers as she is swept along by circumstance on a journey that will take her across the Settled Systems and beyond, discovering the truth about herself and her unique connection to the greater multiverse.

Author's Thoughts:

My latest experiment in emergent storytelling, combining a narrative-focused playthrough of Starfield with my usual webcomic style.

For most of my life I've loved how games can create an engine to generate stories writers would never think of. This goes beyond the hand-written plots many games come with. It's the ones they didn't write that I find most fascinating; Those stories that come from the unique convergence of randomly-generated scenarios and unlikely characters finding themselves in the middle of these scenarios. As a writer, I enjoy thinking about how characters of different types might approach a situation I couldn't have imagined and how they might get through it. That sort of fascination has defined my evolution as a writer and forced me to adopt a focus on characters above all else. I am always trying to put myself in the head of each character - trying to see things from their unique point of view. It's a challenge with characters who are very unique, easier to do for more relatable ones, but always worthwhile, and when you put them together in situations you don't predict, it prompts new ways of thinking about stories and writing.

Games offer nearly limitless possibilities for this style of writing, and some games are actually built around that kind of story generation. Games like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, and The Sims series are renowned for their ability to take a set of random variables and create a compelling and unpredictable story. I enjoy those games, but I've always loved science fiction and space exploration, and Starfield is pretty much the biggest space exploration focused RPG I've ever seen, so it was a foregone conclusion that I'd be into it. I got the idea to try this experiment fairly recently, and when I started building my modlist for this playthrough I realized how many interesting simulation mods there are - especially survival focused ones. When I finalized the modlist I realized I had the ingredients for an interesting story generator.

This experiment takes the universe and plot of Starfield and combines it with my own hand-crafted narrative, executed through mods and my own webcomic narrative style to deliver a machinima brought to you by the game's photo mode and screenshots. It works as a hybrid playthrough of the game, but puts a heavier focus on the emergent story and my own narrative, so as to deliver something different from your own playthrough or any other. Consider this an alternate reality in the vast multiverse. One possible story among many.