Four Games in One? The old Tim Lamb quote.

(TLDR) Consider Starfield as four games in one - Combat, Building, Roleplay and Exploration. An interesting tool for examining the game and speculate on areas to develop.

(Wordage) Way, way back towards the end of August last year, Tim Lamb - current lead dev for Starfield - said this rather interesting thing in a [Developer Spotlight video] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zknfAghd-s):

"To me, Starfield was like making four games. You have your 'I'm running around shooting aliens and space guys.' You have your 'I'm flying around in a spaceship, shooting other spaceships.' You have the ship builder game, you have the outpost game."

That idea has bounced around in my head for awhile and I'm starting feel it can be refined upon in a way that helps to understand what's going with this complex game.

Here's how you might break things down into four games or rather four gameplay style.

Combat - the shooter/looter cycle. Go to a place, crawl through it shooting enemies and looting stuff as you go. Improve gear and weapons. However in Starfield this has two tiers. The ground version - POIs, spacesuits, guns. And the space version - space dogfights, and your spaceship. There's even an overlap of the two tiers with ship boarding with zero-G thrown into the mix.

Building - Constructing structures and objects. Another system that grows and gets more elborate and is also two tiered. Outposts, the ground version, and spaceship building, the mobile space version. You could possibly include smaller crafting system in here.

Tim had already mention these, but then there are two other areas he perhaps could of added.

Roleplay - Questing, character interaction and world-building. Stories and themes unpacked through quests, dialogue and RPG systems, as well as locations and background lore that set a certain vibe. A cornerstone to these are the factions which each build around a particular theme/genre.

Exploration - navigating a large world randomly discovering smaller locations. This involves system of travel, the freedom to go in any direction you want, macro and micro levels of exploration and I include survival systems - how you stay alive as you move around the world.

Roleplay, Combat and Exploration have been Bethesda's staples for a long time. Larger Building systems are relatively new - dabbled with in Skyrim then greatly expanded on in Fallout 4.

What's also interesting is how these different styles of play interact with each other, in both good and bad ways. For instance the idea of ship fuel (which was in the game at one point) might add depth to Exploration/survival gameplay and have good some good synergy with Building, but could also become bothersome in Combat or while questing in Roleplay.

My viewpoint on Starfield is that is still developing and that its real form wont be evident until after some 5 major DLCs and 20 system updates - as with Fallout 4. If you look at it through the lens of these gameplay styles, individually Bethesda has expanded on each style (in some places, massively) and for the most part they've done this really well. The rough stuff comes from how these new systems talk to the other game styles or match with the older systems.

As an example, Shipbuilding basically overlaps with Outposts on various roles that settlements had fulfilled previously (place to sleep, storage, display, etc) and has great connections to the Combat, Roleplay and Exploration gameplay loops. Outpost building in itself isn't bad, it just had a lot of its jobs taken over and was hastily given Manufacturing/Supply to compensate. It needs a bit more iteration and some better connection to the other gameplay loops. How could Outposts link better with Combat (Tower defences systems to hold off swarms of hostile local fauna)? How could it connect to Exploration (Improves travel systems - like enables fast travel, adds more useful survival mechanics). How could Roleplay be involved - perhaps a new Outpost focused faction like LIST. You build outposts for third parties like new colonist.

Anyway, I found looking at the game this way helped me to understand what I was enjoying and the things I avoided. It also made it really easily to come up with mod ideas.

So what do you folks think. Are there four games at once in Starfield? More? Less? And if so, what are they?