We don't talk about Dr Victor Aiza enough, and he's quite possibly the most important named character in Starfield.
I'm not sure which Aiza should get the title, the in-world one, or the Starborn one who gave him the "vision."
A quick recap of Aiza's role in the setting: Dr Victor Aiza was a scientist working on Mars who discovered an Artifact. He touched the Artifact and got a vision of himself as a Starborn (presumably some future version of himself, maybe, more on that later). This version of Aiza gave the local version sufficient knowledge to develop grav drives and a desire to send humanity to the stars.
He deliberately leaked a flawed version of the grav drive technology, which forced humanity to leave Earth. Then he released the fixed version, leaving humanity to "safely" explore the stars. In his last days, he began to doubt himself. His body was found with a violent and fatal head wound. The cause of the injury is not clear.
Other than Aiza's role in setting up the premise, the game pretty much ignores him, which is wild.
Firstly, the setup in Starfield is the result of deliberate in-game time-traveling Starborn / a "non-Starborn." Nothing in the game would have happened without Aiza choosing to act the way he did. And while I cannot be sure, this appears to be true of every universe you travel to. Although each universe has slight (or sometimes less-than-slight) differences, Aiza and his actions, his fate, remains constant. Is this a constraint on the universes you can travel to? Did free will not exist until humanity discovered the Unity? If this is a constant, it raises other important questions.
If Dr Victor Aiza never made it to the Unity he would never become a Starborn. So where did his vision come from?
The simplest answer is that Aiza came from a universe where Aiza didn't die. Which raises the question: why can't we reach that world?
Now, travelling through the Unity does give you a chance to interact with alternative versions of yourself from different times, but Aiza imparted a lot of knowledge in, if going by the starfarer, experiences, a very short amount of time. Aiza wasn't researching gravity, but rocks. To do what Aiza did would require a lot of understanding of a completely new technology previously thought impossible. Was it a new Starborn power, that allowed this? Was it a lie created by whoever builds the temples, and the "gifts" you get from passing through the Unity?
To be fair to Starfield, there are many answers to these questions, but they require players to fill in gaps the game chooses not to. Which is one of reasons I find Aiza so interesting.
Another reason is that the "Starborn" Aiza actually seems to want to do something interesting with the Unity. Aiza uses the Unity to dramatically reshape humanity. That is so much more interesting than the Hunter or the Emissary. Nearly all the other Starborn seem obsessed with getting through the Unity and preventing others from doing so. The latter half is a little confusing, as passing through the Unity doesn't seem to exclude others from doing so. Aiza, on the other hand, actually used the power of the Unity to achieve something amazing, and in doing so became the most important named NPC in Starfield.
So no, we don't talk about Dr Victor Aiza enough.
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