With Starfinder: Afterlight, a new sci-fi role-playing game is being developed on Steam. The creators have a clear credo: The world lives from its characters. Baldur’s Gate 3 serves as a model, and one of its voice actors even provided tutoring.
What kind of game is this?
- Starfinder: Afterlight comes from the indie studio Epictellers Entertainment and is based on the second edition of Starfinder, the sci-fi offshoot of Pathfinder – One of the biggest competitors to Dungeons & Dragons.
- In Afterlight, your captain is missing, and you gather 6 unique companions to stop the impending doomsday. The game is completely single-player and focuses on storytelling.
- As is common for cRPGs, the gameplay consists of many conversations with options that can shape your story and isometric, turn-based battles. You can choose from 6 classes in the Starfinder rulebook for your character.
What makes Starfinder: Afterlight so special: As they explained in conversation with PCGamesN, the developers focus mainly on the companions. They are what brings the game to life, they say:
Our main goal is to make the companions as lively as possible. Voice acting contributes a lot to this. […] Companions are one of the cornerstones of the story and the game.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Larian’s previous work, Divinity, apparently served as models. As a mentor, Neil Newbon, the voice actor of Astarion from Baldur’s Gate 3, has helped the developers. How serious Epictellers is can already be seen in two of the main roles:
- Tycho, a kind of space inventor rat, is voiced by Inel Tomilson. Tomilson is known to you as Quartus from Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 as well as from Final Fantasy XVI and Dragon Age: The Veilguard (various roles here).
- The voice of the soldier Kole has an even larger portfolio: Fred Tatasciore voices Bane in the Batman Arkham games, Kil’jaeden and Etrigg in WoW, Zeratul in Starcraft and Heroes of the Storm, the new Mordekaiser from LoL and Soldier: 76 from Overwatch. For all his over 1,000 roles, check out IMDb.
Currently, it is just English voice acting. Whether the game will be released and dubbed in German is still unknown.
Afterlight will soon launch a campaign on Kickstarter and already the developers have promised a “very famous” actress who will come on board. A release date has not yet been announced. You can currently wishlist the game on Steam.
Starfinder: Afterlight forgoes a script, aims to simulate what makes Pen and Paper so good
What sets Afterlight apart from other role-playing games is that the voice actors receive very few guidelines. Instead of strictly following a script and voicing pre-written texts, the voice actors are encouraged to improvise.
As PCGamesN explains, the voice actors are explicitly told to have fun while working and to goof around. This brings “the characters to life.”
In Pen and Paper, interactions are never predetermined but always spontaneous – something that cannot happen in a programmed video game. The improvisation aims to simulate this at least in part.
How well Starfinder will work as a cRPG remains to be seen. The system itself has not yet had a breakthrough in the video game sector; however, the original version, Pathfinder, already has. Owlcat has already shown with Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous that the complex role-playing system can indeed work as a video game: One of the best role-playing games is finally complete and larger than Baldur’s Gate 3, costing me my entire vacation
