Ranking The Rag-Tag Spaceship Crews of Videogames
- Uncategorized
- September 23, 2024
If there is one thing I love it is a rag-tag bunch of misfits, each with their own agendas and emotional damage, who are forced to live and work together aboard a spaceship having adventures.
And it is no surprise that my love of the spaceship-bound band of misfits is a big part of why I wrote Fermi’s Progress, my series of novellas about the crew of a prototype FTL ship that explodes every planet it visits.
With D & Deception, the first novella of the new Fermi sequence, Fermi’s Wake, part of the reason I kept the action confined to the ship was to really give the characters some time to stew and bounce off each other, and to give the readers a glimpse of what their lives and relationships were like during the weeks and months between planet detonations.
I’ve written about the glory of the spaceship ensemble in prose fiction, and I probably don’t need to tell you about all the gloriously mismatched spaceship crews that have graced the small screen over the years. But videogames are also a surprisingly strong seam of people who have decided to occupy a set of small rooms surrounded by endless vacuum together, even if they probably shouldn’t.
So naturally I have decided to list them in ascending order of quality.
11. The Trailblazer - Star Wars: Outlaws
I’m here to rank the ship crews, not the games themselves, and it’s got to be said that this is a game I have put a lot of hours into over the last month.
It is a very pretty rendering of the Star Wars universe, clearly made with love even if there are some janky gameplay and design choices here and there.
And I love Kay Vess. The problem with every single stealth game I’ve ever played is that you play a hypercompetent ninja, an ally of the shadows, resulting in some heavy ludonarrative dissonance when I blunder straight into the guards’ lunch room. Kay is a fuck up, so when halfway through a meticulously planned heist I find myself running screaming through an imperial base firing randomly in all directions, I feel like I’m just being true to my character.
But for a game that signposts pretty early on that it is a story about finding your crew, the gang Kay assembles across the outer rim is pretty weak tea. Aside from the cute animal companion and the regular sparring with battle-droid heavy ND-5, Kay rarely feels like she has any kind of deeper relationship with anyone else on her crew, and they have even less to do with each other. I have felt more meaningful bonds between passengers waiting for a late bus
10. The Frontier - Starfield
Starfield is also a member of the fatally flawed games that I have still poured many, many hours of my life into club. You can read a great breakdown of those flaws in this video by Jessie Earl.
Of course, your actual crew in Starfield (as well as your ship) is very much a DIY affair, but one way or another it’s safe to assume a chunk of them will be Constellation recruits.
And like a lot of the character and worldbuilding in Starfield they’re… okay. It feels like Starfleet if it was run by Keir Starmer. There are token deviations, all within an acceptable Overton window, but nobody really disagrees with anyone, or stands for anything beyond a vague “space exploration is good” ideal. The most intra-crew interactions comes from my cowboy husband, Sam Coe, and his daughter, but overall, everything here feels just a little bit sterile.
9. The Northstar - Concord
I don’t want to kick this game when it is already extremely down. As it happens, I played the Beta a few times, and it was fun.
As far as I’m concerned, Concord was kept from true greatness by two things.
A: There should have been a rival crew who were markedly visually different from the Northstar crew despite having all the same abilities, to get rid of the eerie feeling of constantly fighting a team of your own clones.
B: There should have been a between games hub set aboard the Northstar so that I could hang out in the spaceship kitchen.
But that aside, the main thing about Concord is just how very badly it wants to be Guardians of the Galaxy. It wants it so bad it can taste it. There were loads of cinematic trailers showing the “fun” dynamics between the crew – sometimes bordering dangerously on zany.
And yet, it never quite that there. The barbs were never quite sharp enough. The moments of warmth and affection never quite felt earned.
Maybe one day we will see a retooled version of the Northstar crew, but for now they only just reach the rank of also-rans.
8. Sanctuary III - Borderlands 3
Dangerously zany, you say? Not going to lie, a huge part of why I bought Borderlands 3 was because it had a big spaceship hub for you to hang on board between missions.* The Sanctuary III is a weird space – there are enough randos wandering its halls that it feels like a lived-on, working environment that continues to exist when you’re not there, but at the same time the ship’s sole purpose is to taxi you and your co-op squad around the galaxy to whichever open world loot pit you need to pillage next.
The crew itself is a rolodex of returning fan favourites, and as someone who’s only real emotional connection to the Borderlands universe is that I liked the first Tales of the Borderlands game, I imagine this is how most people feel about the MCU.
But back to Dangerously Zany – Borderlands as a franchise is obviously way more in love with its own schtick than anybody could possibly be. But that love for its own schtick does translate to its love for its own characters, so when the game is jumping up and down yelling “Hey look! It’s THAT GUY! Remember THAT GUY?! We love THAT GUY! Wait for it…. DICK JOKE!” you can’t help but accept the proffered vigorous handshake and politely say “Oh yes, of course, Mr Thatguy, pleasure to meet you again. How’s that penis of yours doing?”
*I will buy basically any game for that reason alone. I consider myself above actually paying for a Call of Duty game, but when Infinity War hits gamepass, I will be there.
7. The Stinger Mantis - Star Wars: Jedi
Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor are both solo games about Cal Kestis, but over the course of the games he does assemble himself quite the nice little found family aboard the Mantis. While you might never see the whole gang working together in the field, they give good chat between missions, and it is always nice seeing Greez potter about his kitchen, or Cal trying to hide his thumping great crush on Merrin.
But the big difference between the crews of the Mantis and Trailblazer is that the Trailblazer crew have come together for a job, but have very little to connect them beyond that. The crew of the Mantis are together because they have all been hurt in a similar way, which is just a massive cheat code for instant audience-attachment.
6. The Milano - Guardians of the Galaxy
My old pal Nate Crowley once mercilessly skewered Square Enix’s Guardians of the Galaxy when he called it a “brilliant, if legally reckless parody“, following in the foot steps of their game about the Avengers “as painted on the sides of British funfair rides”. It is such a precise and devastating takedown that I actually feel a bit bad for liking this game.
Yes, these guys do come up a bit short when compared to their James-Gunn-directed counterparts. But that is because Gunn is extremely fucking good at what he does, which is tell stories about ensembles of damaged people who somehow find emotional closure by doing a lot of punching to a forensically chosen soundtrack.
But despite that, the Square Enix interpretation of the Guardians actually comes out ahead of their movie counterparts in a few key ways, and not just because they aren’t saddled with Chris Pratt. Actually, that’s a lot of it.
The Enix Star Lord is every bit the goofy shagabout slacker he is in the movies, but there’s more than that. He gives his crew encouragement and emotional support. He’s able to navigate the narrow paths between their massively conflicting personalities. You can actually see why he’s the leader, beyond the fact that this is the default job for the mostly useless white dude.
And that is reflected in the game play, because more than any other game in this list, Guardians is about managing a team, giving orders and motivation and sometimes even vaguely trying to plan as opposed to simply switching characters or having them follow you around to offer a bit of supporting fire.
5. The Daedalus - The Long Journey Home
A space mission to test a prototype Alcubierre drive goes wrong, catapulting the ship’s crew across the galaxy to a mysterious alien sphere where they pick up a universal translator, and then commence an epic voyage through space, bickering among themselves and running into a range of bizarre aliens in a story reminiscent of old science fiction TV like Firefly and Farscape.
Yes, it’s fair to say that when this game came out while I was in the middle of writing Fermi’s Progress, it made me pretty bloody nervous.
But crossovers of interest aside, The Long Journey Home is a lovely bit of sci-fi storytelling. It does an excellent job of making you feel like you’re on a The Martian or Europa Report level spaceship that has somehow stumbled into a Star Trek level universe. And a big part of that is the crew themselves, as brought to life by writer Richard Cobbett and his self-confessed tendency to massively over-write. At every stage of the game there is the bickering, gossip, and idle complaints that you expect from the back seat on a long journey. The crew could use a smidge more diversity in its offering (how many bearded white guy self-proclaimed geniuses does one spaceship need?), but these characters are likeable enough that you will push on with your save game long after you have made several mistakes that have already doomed the entire mission, because you don’t want to abandon these guys.
4. The Drifter - Wild Bastards
Space sci-fi has always had a problematic addiction to the Wild West. From Star Trek‘s “wagon train to the stars” to Cowboy Bebop, to Firefly, to everything that came afterwards that wanted to be Firefly, there are a lot of people who want to wear a Stetson on a spaceship.
That is amplified even further by videogames – count how many entries on this very list couldn’t be described as “The Wild West in Space”. It’s not many. So I’ve got to admit I was a little disappointed when Blue Manchu followed up Void Bastards, a game where you basically run and gun your way through a nebula of Space Job Centres, with Wild Bastards’ more traditional space western fare.
But what Wild Bastards does is go even harder on the space western aesthetic than anyone out there. Each one of the Bastards Who Are Wild is a Wild West stereotype writ in the largest possible font (apart from that one guy who’s a London punk who throws knives), mashed up with a grab bag of sci-fi concepts. I love each of these characters so much, from the bitchy space alien Roswell, to the just-pleased-to-be-there Chthulhuoid gunslinger Billy the Squid, to the superficially amicable Casino (who I personally reckon is low-key the coldest bastard of the bunch).
As well as offering just a great batch of characters, Wild Bastards is also a game that is all about gathering and maintaining your crew and their relationships to one another. This is done not through loyalty missions or dialogue trees, but through the careful and strategic application of sharing tins of beans. The feuds and squabbles between different gang members will affect who will be willing to ride with you, which in turn effects what combat options you can take into the game’s frenetic FPS sandboxes.
I’m still shooting my way to the end of this one, so I don’t know if the gang gets to The Homestead or (as I suspect) end up all killing each other, but either way, I’m with these Bastards to the end.
3. The Normandy - Mass Effect Trilogy
If you’re the sort of person to just scroll down the listicle to see how your faves placed, there are good odds the Normandy crew is one of the ones you were looking for. And you are well within your rights to be furious with me that Shepard & Friends didn’t get top billing. The massive entangled found family tree you assemble over the course of the three Mass Effect games are the OG band of gun-toting disaster bisexuals, and we will love them always.
This is the crew that offers you the chance to sleep with a tree bark covered lizard whose main personality trait is “Police Brutality” and your response is “Hmm. Maybe…” It is the crew where many of us, probably more than would willingly admit it, committed a genocide against a formerly enslaved people because we didn’t want to upset our girlfriend.
One of the seams running through Fermi’s Wake is the way that solidarity with the people immediately around you can drive you to complicity in some fucked up shit, but Mass Effect has me beat hands down on that front.
So while the Normandy crew might be taking the bronze on this particular list, they will always be one of the all time greats.
2. The Unreliable - The Outer Worlds
Of all the videogames that are A Bit Like Firefly, The Outer Worlds is the most A Bit Like Firefly-est. Not only does it lean hard into the retro-futuristic space western vibe (with a liberal sprinkling of Fallout-esque satire-of-capitalism-that-isn’t-that-harsh-on-capitalism-really), but its crew includes a lovably enthusiastic yet naive engineer, a preacher with a shady past, and a guy who’s just like, a guy. That’s his thing, being the just a guy guy.
And here’s the bit where I go “But scratch the surface and it’s so much more than that…” but I won’t, because it’s not. The Outer Worlds is a giant helping of what you see is what you get. The reason this has managed to rank number two on this list is that it manages to do it so fucking well.
There are no romance subplots in The Outer Worlds (well, no romance subplots for you, the player character, anyway), and what that means is you get a succession of buddy stories where you’re just helping your pals out. But what really sets the crew of the Unreliable (great ship name, btw) apart from the pack of packs, is how much you look forward to coming back to the ship at the end of a mission. Maybe you’ll find one character giving another shooting lessons in the cargo bay, maybe they’ll be chatting in the stairwell about their favourite radio serial, or arguing about chores in the kitchen. Maybe they’ll simply be queueing the for toilet. But with a few nicely written scenes the developers of The Outer Worlds have managed to make the ship feel like a cozy flying flatshare that continues to exist while you’re off doing violence. Every single member of the crew feels like a stand-out character, and you root for all of them, to the point where I’m a little relieved they won’t be back in Outer Worlds 2 so I can’t mess up their happy endings.
But now it is time for the best rag-tag spaceship, my favourite guys, my number one crew… yes please hand over any sharp or heavy throwable objects at the door… the winner is…
1. The Tempest - Mass Effect: Andromeda
It is my privilege to die on this hill. The crew of the Normandy are the OG, and Mass Effect: Andromeda had its missteps (leaving all the most interesting species on the ark that hadn’t arrived yet and not having a romanceable Elcor crewmate, primarily), and yes, there was plenty about the “movie night” sequence that was more than a little cringe. But the fact remains that out of all the crews on this list, these are objectively the best guys to hang out with.
If the Normandy is the ship of disaster bisexuals who make bad decisions (at least, they do when I make them), the Tempest is made up of all the people who were a bit too weird to fit in on the Normandy, with the exception of Liam who is just a simple, kind and decent soul who frankly needs to be protected from everything else (is it too obvious what my romancing choices were in each of these games?).
But as in Outer Worlds, these characters become a crew. They have relationships with each other, rather than simply standing in their allotted bit of ship waiting for you to come and do a dialogue tree with them. They leave each other notes on the fridge. They argue in the backseat as you ride the NOMAD around – and sometimes make friends. Or get jealous because you had a bit of side action with the blue archaeologist (sorry Liam).
Andromeda builds on the character archetypes we meet in the rest of the Mass Effect franchise, adding extra details and layers of nuance that make them feel more fleshed out than any of the other crews on this list, and that is what makes them the crew you would most want to hang out with.
If you want to hang out with the crew of the deadly starship Fermi, Fermi’s Wake: D & Deception is out now. You can buy it individually or as part of the Fermi’s Wake season pass at Scarlet Ferret, which means I get more royalties and you get a bonus short story, or you can buy it from Amazon here.
Fermi’s Progress is also available as a season pass from Scarlet Ferret (which includes all four Fermi’s Progress novellas in one volume), and can be bought as a paperback from Amazon.
