Starfield is a video game set in the 24th century, a time of interstellar travel, alien encounters and intelligent robots. Our possibilities for sustenance, and pleasure, are almost limitless. Unless we're talking about coffee.
One of my few joys playing through Starfield (it's not great!) was the degree to which its spaceships--and to a lesser extent some of its bases and facilities--have been so meticulously designed. Everything looks like it works, and serves a function, and while that's great for immersion in a lavish first-person singleplayer RPG, it's also just something I am very into, and appreciate, visually.
My admiration has its limits, though, and they were reached when a few hours into the game I started noticing that the inhabitants of Starfield's universe were suffering through a coffee situation I could only recon as being "dreadful". One of the game's big criticisms has been--and this was made very clear coming in the wake of Baldur's Gate 3 and a Cyberpunk expansion--how drab and lifeless Starfield's inhabitants are, from their dialogue to their voice acting.
While a lot of that blandness is down to just the way Bethesda have been stuck making these kinds of games for 20 years, I think Starfield also has an in-universe explanation for it: everyone is too busy working/trying to survive, and so everyone is tired, and they're tired because their coffee sucks.
Let me explain.
Starfield's in-universe coffee situation goes like this: there are three distinct types of coffee machine spread throughout its environments, while there's also a retail chain specialising in coffee sales (that you can visit, and which some quest storylines actually include). Which is actually pretty great, most games might have just put a single coffee machine in every ship and called it a day, so I at least appreciate the lengths Bethesda went to here to depict our species' continued reliance on a cup of joe.
Let's begin our case study by talking about the game's coffee machines. There's a weird visual dissonance throughout Starfield, where a bunch of stuff that's incredibly clean, futuristic and practical (starships and bases especially) collide with objects, costumes and environments clearly produced by people who worked on the retro-Americana Fallout games. This drip coffee machine (above) is a great example (even if, to be fair, you could also say its also drawing inspiration from classic 20th century Italian machines).
It's fine, I guess. It's a drip coffee machine, you can't really fuck that up. Coffee brews up top, it drips into the glass carafe, anyone who has been to an American diner or workplace in the last 50 years will know the deal. Anyone who hasn't should know this is the worst possible way to enjoy coffee. In most of its applications it tastes like someone pissed in an ashtray then set it on fire. And while there are specialist, delicious exceptions to this, I don't think that's what the art team was going for here. This is clearly Starfield's "terrible office coffee", it looks as much, and in nailing that brief it's by far the most accurate and successful exploration of a coffee-related theme in this universe. It would probably make terrible coffee, and make everyone who drank it miserable, but that's the point.
Onto the second machine. I originally thought this was Starfield's take on a Nespresso machine, and had a whole diatribe loaded in the chamber about sustainability, terrible beans with terrible grinds, human rights abuses, the works. But upon closer examination--and despite the fact it's often placed in the game on its own alongside cups and beans, suggesting it's a coffee machine--this instead, from its shape and button layout, appears to be a grinder, and a fancy one at that, with an arched design that calls to mind Baratza's excellent Sette series of consumer machines.
It could be a Nespresso machine, if only for the aforementioned fact that it's often placed alone--why would you grind beans if you didn't have another machine to actually brew them?--but you never see the pods such a machine would require, while the game is full of bags and vacuum containers of beans/grinds for other types of coffee brewing. So I'm going to go with this being a grinder, and put its odd in-game placement down to the fact that maybe the developers had to fill countless rooms and ships with junk, and the folks filling the rooms weren't the same ones designing the machines.
Judging it as a grinder, then, this is OK. It's got a lot of settings, and while there doesn't appear to be the adjustments needed to make it a stepless burr grinder--something an espresso aficionado would demand--it looks like there are enough buttons, menus and settings to produce some decent grinds for the average space-faring adventurer.
Not that there are any espresso aficionados to worry about, though, because if there were, they certainly wouldn't stand for this:
What the fuck is this. At first glance, you'd think this is an espresso machine, right? It's big, it's shaped like an espresso machine, you've been to a cafe, you've seen one, this is the thing a barista will use. Yet here, everything is wrong. This is an espresso machine as depicted by AI. It's an espresso machine designed by a child who is drawing it from memory.
This espresso machine only has one grouphead (the part where the water comes out and you plug the portafilter in), even though in Starfield it's often pictured in commercial settings--like cafes!--where a machine like this should have two, three or even four groupheads, in order to make as much coffee as possible at a time.
Bizarrely, alongside that single grouphead are two steam wands? Two? Why would you be making only one coffee at a time but steaming two jugs of milk? Only a cafe specialising in serving children hot cocoa before bedtime would need that much frothy milk. Next time you're at an actual cafe go look at the espresso machine, tell me how many groupheads it has, then look at how many steam wands it has (some smaller machines might look like they have two steam wands, but unlike Starfield's identical appendages they'll be different shapes, because one isn't actually a steam wand, it's usually a direct hot water tap for people who want an Americano or a cup of tea).
Were this some weird little curiosity, a machine you only ever saw once every ten times you enter a location, this would be fine. I may not have even noticed it. It's the 24th century, maybe some niche coffee weirdos (or cocoa lovers) got weird in space. But this machine is everywhere in Starfield. It's in cafes, it's in offices, it's on starships, it's in secret military installations. It is, by my reckoning, the galaxy's only espresso machine, to the point where it's doing the heavy lifting at the TerraBrew chain of coffee shops. And it sucks!
Even its menu (the screen in the middle of the unit's top bar) is bad. For a machine of this size you would hope for manual steam wand control (usually in the form of a knob or valve), and some degree of brew adjustment via its central display. Instead there are just six buttons, none of which appear to control anything on the screen in the middle. This is Taobao-tier shit. I would not want to make espresso with this machine, and if I did, I would not be expecting a tasty cup of coffee.
Which brings us to TerraBrew, Starfield's take on a Starbucks-like megachain. It has issues.
This is a galactic chain store, a focal point for an entire settlement's mainstream coffee consumption (or even a whole megacity!), it's going to be as busy as a Starbucks could ever be and--as I've outlined above--this place only has two machines, so it can only make two coffees at a time? Why bother opening the doors. By the 10th customer there'll be a 15-minute wait. It's a disaster.
And while we're still in TerraBrew, let's zoom in on that menu, because what the hell is happening here:
What is this? It's a menu, yeah, but it's also an attempt at an illustrated guide to types of coffee based on its components (coffee, milk, foam, chocolate), like the one below:
That is a good guide! Starfield's is not. Its ratios and components are all over the place, and it's very difficult on the eye to see a side-on depth comparison depicted from a top-down perspective (looking down into a cup), like the coffee and milk has been inserted in vertical slices. If anything the visual aid makes ordering even harder than it should be, as though it's intentionally--in a nod to the extreme optimisation and misdirection capitalism must be excelling in by the 24th century--shepherding customers towards simply giving up and ordering the "classic", the only coffee they actually know how to make quickly and to scale. Like the espresso machine's design, it makes me wonder if some artist, somewhere along the line genuinely knew what they wanted, but the orders passed through enough sets of misunderstanding ears that the final product is just completely wrong.
Anyway. All of this is to say that if you've played Starfield and think everyone you meet is a little flat, this might be why. You would be too if you'd spent 200 years as a species without a decent cup of coffee.
