I'm at my heart a setting writer - a deeply unhinged setting writer, but I repeat myself - and Starsector's given me a lot of inspiration in how to do character and setting writing.
I am most decidedly
not a setting writer - in my WIP (which I'm supposed to be working on
right now, but here I am typing this,) I already know the deep emotional motivations of all my characters and all that but the setting boils down to "aliens bad, geek'em" and a firm knowledge of why the 1,000 ton supertanks are Totally Justifiable And Not Just Bolos With The Serial Numbers Filed Off. (They are.) But I'd like to mirror your observation(s) from another angle - character writing. Because we ultimately interact with this world through its characters. They're what bring it to life. And the characters are well-done. I could praise that a bit - and, in fact, I will, because I've been playing through the new version at last (got laid off recently) and I've screenshotted almost every single story (and side-story) textblock so far as a proper post talking about the writing in Starsector has been on my mind for years now. Alas, I have a story of my own to finish. So for now: yeah, the writing is good. Not news to anyone with eyes. But there's something
more to it I want to point out - how it's integrated with the game.
Gargoyle and Zal are both too much of a quirky 2 kool 4 skool characters for my taste.
Sure. Gargoyle's an archetype; the Clever Rad Hacker Mans - the brilliant mind constantly in need of stimulation and challenge being part of it (and one true-to-life; I know the type to various degrees.) But archetypes exist for a
reason; they exist in the real world. The only mistake is treating them like a straitjacket. Gargoyle is definitely terrified when you come back to pick him up after the relay hack, he
knows he's put his ass in a sling. But then you take him to the Academy and his usual...
personality just bounces off Biard like a stone off a glacier.
And that's where the game aspect comes in - first conversation with Biard after the hack, she cuts Gargoyle off on comms abruptly, and you can go to the comms menu, buzz him and continue that conversation. And he expresses
delight that wow, you asked, you actually asked! You get to see a different side of him; one that's
appreciative; you get a sense of how he's been chafing at Biard's...
personality. You
get to sense things that've been happening off-screen, the world moving without you, and it's something you can miss if you don't feel like calling him up. If you
don't like Gargoyle and his 2kew4skewl BS, you can skip that conversation entirely. The fact you exercised agency as a player in contacting him is
acknowledged, it's used in the story.
The big story update, of course, was a bombshell for the game. But I find this latest one has redoubled that. Sure, there's more side quests, and those are great, but what's better is how they tie into the rest of the game - the Luddic Pilgrimage one, for instance, has an impact later when you need to shoo a fleet of pilgrims away for a gate-scan. And of course, there's
many more bar events now, anywhere you go, as well as the security fleet conversations. You are making a
stir in this world; you're a player, shifting the very bedrock of the Sector with your actions, and
people are taking notice. This world is alive, you can poke it and it
pokes back. Prior to the big story update, many said that colony building didn't fit the theme; the core worlds've been struggling to survive for 200 cycles and then you pop up and found your own empire in a few years? Please. But after the story update it became explicit just how
busy the outer worlds of the sector are; research outposts and Tri-Tach dark sites and scavengers who've run around often enough to sell you local hyperspace topography data. And when your impact on the sector is made known, it stands to reason that you'd be able to found new colonies - and
keep them alive. You're not nobody - you certainly have to earn your victories, but you're an Adama, someone who can single-handedly reshape the sector through acumen, savvy and battlefield skills. The narrative-focused colony interaction things in the next update are
perfect tie-ins to this.
Unlike most of my friends, I play with utility-only mods, and that's because I
like the vanilla ships; especially how each one has a history and function that's
more than just flavor text. They
fit into this world; you can see whence they came from what they do
now. The Eradicator stood out to me in the patch that added it - for securing the flanks of a battle-line, like swordsman covering the flanks of a pike formation, its innate speed is more than enough and ammo accelerator fits the "more firepower" battle-line doctrine. And the burn-drive variant's existence echoes a likely debate in the Domain admiralty over maintaining cohesion amongst the battle-line in advance, and perhaps the first mutterings of the "cruiser school" adherents as they watch the Admiralty seize upon the bright idea of a fast, maneuverable cruiser... and then ruin it with their obsession with ballistics instead of rapid striking power. The pirate variant doesn't exist because it's perfect for pirates, it's
still around because of that; the origins aren't hard to discern. In other words, the ships are characters in this story too.
The mechanics serve the story and the story serves the mechanics.I spent years writing "CYOA" style stories (you may know them as "quests,") and aside from the oddity of second-person, present-tense (which I still slip into unconsciously whilst trying to write other things, egads,) player agency is what really makes that kind of writing stand apart from all others. Some people run them as interactive narrative experiences, and others incorporate more "game" elements; complete with players getting to roll digital dice and hosting sites with software to support such features. And Starsector really reminds me of a CYOA done well, where the player and writer are working in concert, with a shared vision, and
breathing the world they imagine. That's had enough to pull off
with actual ongoing dialogue between player and creator - much less in a single player game.
But it goes beyond mere verisimilitude via dint of excellent execution. It works because there
is a narrative, a protagonist, agency,
velocity. As OP says the game tackles difficult subject matter artfully and the character focus is key to that. But many poor writers can, and have taken that approach and still stood up cardboard cutouts to fill various roles. And one such cardboard cutout is "the downright evil villain who nonetheless has a point." Many poor writers will pen such a character and fill his mouth with pithy philosophy before the player fills it with the business end of a blaster because it's just so much airy BS that doesn't actually
land, because nowhere in the story, the world, is there any evidence for it. But in Starsector, when Livewell Cotton, an actual factual terrorist from a faction that's killed
millions and sundered entire worlds, sits down across a table from you with tea in his hand and tells you to beware...
I was inclined to listen. Because the visit was occasioned by a vessel in my fleet that is tangible evidence of
something inhuman, well beyond the ken of anyone in the Sector.
Maybe a further evolution of rogue AIs left to their own devices in the outer systems... and then again, maybe not. Because
something collapsed the extra-dimensional hyperspace matrices of the gates, and in the eerie unreality of
that place you've seen ghosts dance and twirl and
more than that... and as you stood by the silent adamantine rings, you heard a faint whisper of ethereal music. The kind nav officers insist they hear whilst the men at the weapons console roll their eyes and the shield officer's mouth twitches.
You listen, because the terrorist has a
point. Everyone does. But they don't know the half of it; gripping to tails and legs. Through a quirk of fate, you're the only one who can begin to glimpse the whole elephant.
And it's
terrifying.... so the writing in this game? It's good.
