Will Starfield capture the little details that give space its wonder?

Hello! Welcome to Captain’s Log, a mini-series on the things we love about space – and how video games so brilliantly engage with it. You can read all of our pieces in the series in one place as they go live, here at the Captain’s Log archive. Enjoy!

One of the things I’m most looking forward to with Starfield is the details, I think. I’m here for the main adventure, sure, but I tend to love the small stuff in big games – the components on a rocket or a space suit, the callbacks to the tiniest pieces of real-world inspiration. I got very excited when I saw the Starfield logo in a video earlier this year, the logo against what looked like – my eyes aren’t great – a white background of space with dark stars and nebulae scattered over it. Could this be a winking reference to the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, whose photographic plates of the heavens are always seen as negatives, the same white space, the same black stars?

Jury’s out on that one. It’s entirely possible I just need new glasses. But part of the joy of space games in particular to me is that, as a bit of a space nerd, I can look at the little stuff and wonder.