Starfield's opening is a lot of shades of literal grey

rockpapershotgun.com:

Space games are basically ready built for the grand reveal. All you need to do is open a shutter and you can reveal unto the player all the wonders of the universe you have built, be that a giant, misty blue planet with a neon green dust ring, or purple nebula sweeping accross the sky like a bruise and crackling with lightning. Starfield's opening (shown off at Gamescom this week, and leaking all over the internet like a collander used for SMG target practice) does not forgo this moment, but it does say "okay but what if the grand reveal was entirely in shades of grey, though"?

You start in a mine underground, lit only by the lights on you and your fellow miners' suits. So far, so good: this is a perfect way to enclose your player to juxtapose a grand reveal later. Your supervisor, Lin, and a more senior miner Heller, provide algorithmically inoffensive banter. Lin is a taskmaster, Heller is a bit more of a wisecracker; neither feel particularly idiosyncratic in the way that the best 'thesda supporting characters, like Sheogorath the trickster Daedric prince, can be. But hey, it's very early, and you can tell there's hella world building, because miners are referred to as Dusties. I'll take some slightly awkward in-universe slang in this work-a-day world.

After being taught to use a mining laser, you're sent to retrieve a weird and important artefact buried in deposits of a sort of luxury, gravity defying fool's gold - which is, by the way, not the job I'd give to someone on their first day. You touch said item and experience basically the inciting event of Mass Effect, i.e. a mysterious vision and a fainting episode, but it's been 15 years since the first Mass Effect, so who remembers? And honestly, I think video games