A Well-Known Starfield Inside Joke Actually Reveals A Huge Missed Opportunity

Summary Starfield's random NPC chatter hints at missing gameplay mechanics, like heatleeches infesting player ships - a potential game-changer.

Heatleeches could add depth to Starfield's lackluster space travel, making missions more exciting and creating new threats for players to navigate.

Introducing heatleeches as a real threat in Starfield could also help alleviate the game's boring alien species, injecting more personality and uniqueness.

An inside joke contained within Starfield's random NPC chatter suggests a fascinating gameplay feature. Starfield's NPCs have a lot of dialogue, which can help the game feel more alive. This is especially apparent when traveling through one of the major cities. While walking through New Atlantis, players will hear dialogue in a wide variety of languages - Arabic, Swedish, Korean, et cetera - reflecting the diversity of the space age and the cosmopolitan nature of the United Colonies' capital.

That's always been the point of idle NPC chatter: it's a subtle, but immersive way to get across some worldbuilding. Still, Starfield developer Bethesda has a long history with NPC dialogue, and some of its most iconic lines have become popular inside jokes. Starfield follows that legacy with a much-memed NPC voice line of its own. However, this innocent seeming line of dialogue betrays a missing mechanic, which could add a lot of depth to some of Starfield's most overlooked features.

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Starfield's Heatleeches Should've Impacted Ship Performance

How NPC Dialogue Hints At A Missing Mechanic

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Starfield's most iconic NPC voice line suggests that heatleeches can infest the player's ship, even though there's no such mechanic in the game. Anytime the player walks through a major spaceport or the surrounding area, they're bound to hear at least one NPC incessantly intoning, "You should inspect your ship for heatleeches." This has become Starfield's answer to Skyrim's "arrow in the knee," an excessively common voice line the player eventually learns by rote. While it hasn't achieved quite the same iconic status yet, anyone with a few hours in the game has surely heard it at least once.

Now, heatleeches are a little more mechanically relevant than Skyrim's guard who took an arrow to the knee. While the player never really finds out where, how, or why the guard got his injury, they'll encounter quite a few heatleeches as they jet across Starfield's cities and planets. They're among the most harmless enemies in the game, akin to Fallout's radroaches in their insectoid forms and low overall stats. However, despite what the dialogue implies, heatleeches are never seen on the player's ship.

It may seem like a minor thing, but the addition of heatleeches as a greater threat could actually prove an interesting mechanic. It wouldn't fundamentally change the gameplay, but it could solve some of the biggest issues with Starfield as a whole.

How Heatleeches Could Make Starfield's Space Travel More Interesting

A New Threat For Players To Consider

The addition of heatleeches as a potential threat could make Starfield's lackluster space travel more interesting. Although traversing the stars is undeniably part of the game, it's far from Starfield's most central or well-developed feature. Players really only need to control their ships directly when they're looking for a specific location or engaging in some space combat; as a means of hopping from planet to planet, real-time ship piloting just isn't as viable as fast travel. As a result, players are basically conditioned to avoid piloting their ships unless they absolutely have to.

This is detrimental to trade missions, too. They're a lot less exciting when all a player has to do to complete them is teleport to the pickup site, grab the goods, and teleport back. While there's some thrill in the transportation of contraband, even that's as simple as waiting for the result of a scan. Overall, the lack of any real tension makes these Starfield side quests into miserable chores, desperately in need of a new threat to shake things up.

Although shipping missions are technically optional, they're a great way to make money and gain affinity with the relevant faction.

Enter the heatleech. These could pose numerous threats to space travel and trade, either by damaging the ships they latch onto, or even worming their way into holds. A ship laden with heatleeches might have less energy available to divert to its systems, or vulnerabilities in its shield. Or, a player might try to complete a delivery mission only to come up short, and check their cargo hold to find heatleeches have eaten through the goods. More advanced ships might even include modules that allow them to scan for heatleeches automatically, to save the player the effort of checking manually.

It'd be a minor change with a major impact: shipping missions would suddenly be a little more exciting. Players would have an incentive to travel manually between destinations, giving them an opportunity to notice the signs of a heatleech infestation before it's too late. It might lead to some frustration the first couple of times, but the additional learning curve would make space travel even more interesting.

Heatleeches Could Help Solve Starfield's Alien Problem

Starfield's Aliens Are Boring As-Is

Another issue with Starfield is the relative monotony of its alien species. Each alien species is either murderous or meek. They're all mindless, and they're all insects. In short, Starfield's aliens lack personality. Heatleeches as threats to space travel wouldn't completely solve the problem, but it'd give at least one species a unique trait. That could open the way to more detailed alien behavior in the future.

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As they are now, heatleeches suffer from the same problem as all Starfield's other aliens: they don't really do anything. Sure, they can pose a threat at the beginning of the game, but even then, they die in just a couple of hits. They don't have any particularly unique attacks or animations - they're just low level grunts for the player to test their new weapons on. That role has to be filled by someone, but there's no reason dying should be the only thing heatleeches are good for.

NPC dialogue implies that heatleeches are more of a threat to interplanetary industry than they actually are. That helps their case a bit, but if they don't actually exhibit the behavior they're supposedly infamous for, they don't actually make the game any more interesting. If they were to take on that role and become actively dangerous to the player's profits, it'd go a long way toward making Starfield's most boring aspects more interesting.

There's potential for more interesting heatleech features in Starfield DLC, but with no idea of what to expect from Shattered Space, it's impossible to say whether more personable aliens will play a role. For the time being, the heatleech line remains a throwaway joke. It's an amusing little Starfield detail, but it could be much more interesting if it had more impact on the game.