Starfield's Corporations Need to Avoid Seeming Too Much Like The Outer Worlds

gamerant.com:

Starfield'santicipation continues to mount as its early 2023 release draws closer. The first new IP for Bethesda Game Studios in 25 years, Starfield represents director and executive producer Todd Howard's vision built over at least a decade. Howard and his team have created a world that looks naturally evolved from real life with the theme of understanding what's out in space, and humanity's role among the stars.

Howard wants players to create their own immersion, embracing traditional RPG elements rather than forcing them into restricted stories. Set in 2310, the Settled Systems are light-years from Earth with hundreds of star systems and over 1,000 planets, across which players will meet various factions, mercenaries, pirates, explorers, and corporations that have their own agendas. While these ideologies beg to be explored, Starfield must be mindful to avoid mimicking some aspects, especially among its corporations, from The Outer Worlds.

Starfield: Is it Hard or Soft Sci-Fi?

The Outer Worlds from Obsidian Entertainment is a successful RPG in its own right, also occurring hundreds of years in the future when humanity has colonized the stars. While The Outer Worlds is a smaller-scale game compared to Starfield, there are overlapping elements. The game's setting is the Halcyon System, a place proudly advertised as wholly owned by corporations.

The Halcyon Holdings Corporate Board, or simply The Board — ten CEOs of the system's founding companies — control governance, laws, and religion throughout Halcyon. Throughout the game, it becomes increasingly evident that The Board only cares about profits. Food shortages, disease, corporate conspiracies, mutated wildlife, and blissful ignorance exist beneath the system's shiny