Last week saw the release of The Outer Worlds 2, and while I’m looking forward to diving into it soon, I’ve been playing Fallout 4…again. Alas, the call of the siren’s song (or, maybe that’s a settlement beacon) is strong sometimes! I didn’t go into a new playthrough with any grand designs, but I approached it with some rules in mind: (1) support the Railroad; (2) pipe weapons only; and (3) give into distractions. As it goes in these open-world-ish games, I tend to either be a complete scatterbrain, or I stick solely to a guided path. This time, I wanted to try to meet my tendencies somewhere in the middle and be amenable to distraction while following missions. I know that Fallout 4 is full of secrets, and I’ve only ever uncovered a few. This time, while following questlines, I really wanted to allow myself to be fully okay with being distracted by the “shiny things. The things that catch my attention and I might have previously ignored. The things that make me go “hmmm…?”

How’s it been going? Quite well! It’s slow going, but while I continue to open the map, this distraction-led mode of play has uncovered loads of spots that I never knew existed. Clearing out random spots provided a nice XP boost in the early game; and I’m perfectly fine with not being driven here and there by one particular quest-giver. In and among my travels, I completed the first set of Railroad quests and have been following the new Enclave storyline (added with the game’s “next gen” update of last year). The freedom of play has felt really good, and it makes the game feel fresh.

As I’ve been re-treading the Commonwealth, I’ve been thinking a lot about other Fallout games and, of all things, Starfield. For its flaws, Fallout 4 has one good thing going for it: sound design. The same goes for Fallout 76. These games invite exploration by distraction with the use of sound. As you’re traveling, you’ll hear something random in the distance – voices, gunfire, an explosion – and wonder what’s going on over there? Head to that distraction, and maybe you’ll pick up a random quest, or find a secret cache, or see nothing of interest. You won’t know until you know. Earlier Fallout games, the third one and New Vegas, don’t have quite the same pull as far as sound design goes. Their invitations drive the curious off the beaten path are more visual and tied to landmarks. Not a bad thing, but it shows that Fallout 4 took something of a step forward as far as providing interesting audio cues that provoke players to want to sidestep their “comfort” zone.

This brings me to Starfield. I get that for Bethesda it’s both in line with their mechanics and a departure from the norm, but where it really fails is with the inability to distract. Yes, it has hundreds of characters with thousands of lines of dialogue on a thousand different planets, but the push to explore for the sake of exploring, for the joy of discovery through distraction, like in Fallout 4, just isn’t there. Maybe it’s just me, but I tried, I really did. When I went back to the game a few months back to complete its Shattered Space DLC, after it was done, I told myself now I’m going to EXPLORE the UNIVERSE!  Yeah, I didn’t get very far. This isn’t to say that there aren’t some neat spots to visit outside of Starfield’s guided quests, but planetary exploration itself turned out to be rather boring. Maybe it’s because there’s no sound in space(?), but traveling on planets in Starfield is reminiscent of Mass Effect, in that there’s nothing to discover between points of interest. And even the points of interest aren’t all that interesting – caves, “gravitational anomalies,” abandoned bases, pirates, oh, and more pirates. Other than base-building and resource gathering (I guess), there’s no compelling reason to explore much in Starfield. The game completely lacks any captivating sound design outside of the main worlds involved in quests. Without any random,  audible distractions, there’s nothing to make me wonder what’s over there…? Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway, because, upon attempting exploration, I find there’s actually nothing over there to begin with.

I hope that the The Outer Worlds 2 doesn’t disappoint as far as sound design goes, because it was quite good in the first game. Even though there wasn’t much to find off the beaten path on its few worlds, Obsidian still did well to prompt a little discovery through distraction. The best games do well when they stir up curiosity and make players stop following the (or their own) breadcrumb trails; and it certainly helps when that curiosity is rewarded rather than punished. Still, when I hear a faint, random conversation about there being gold in them thar hills, you best believe that I’m going to seek out that spot to go digging.