Starfield
Microsoft promised that after all this time, we would finally get a proper look at Bethesda’s Starfield, set to be released in just over three months. No more in-engine footage, no more brief previews. Starfield instead did a showcase that was nearly as long as Xbox’s entire show. And I don’t think anyone expected it to be as wild as it was.
Very clearly, Starfield is using elements of No Man’s Sky as a base. A thousand planets, instead of infinite ones, but the same concept: exploration. Plus mining, plus cataloguing wildlife, plus building homes and finding ships to sail the stars.
But soon enough, the similarities stop, and you remember that oh wait, there’s also an entire mainline Bethesda RPG layered on top of this, and also, they are doing some things that almost sound too insane to be real.
I almost cannot comprehend the scale and complexity of what was shown off yesterday in the Starfield showcase. If Tears of the Kingdom is baffling people with just how Nintendo made these wild physics puzzles and playgrounds, I am baffled at how Starfield has made a game that seems to be this intensely detailed on every single possible level Among the wildest things that were shown yesterday:
- The ability not just to customize ships, but that adding modules changes the entire layout and interior of the ship when you traverse it to interact with your crew and various workstations you build there.
- A thousand procedurally generated planets but with specific, handcrafted locations to find inside them. A few main planets also have the largest, most sprawling cities Bethesda has ever made.
- The ability not just to dogfight other ships in space, but board those ships, taking out their interior crew and then claiming the entire ship as your own. This translates to becoming a pirate yourself and raiding civilian vessels. Raiding them for sandwiches, if you want.
Starfield
- Power management for your ship depending on what you’re trying to do, explore or fight. A similar system for managing your crew which you can assemble from main storyline characters or random people you encounter or rescue in the wild.
- I’m not sure anything blew my mind quite as much as the exploration of gravity, something nearly every sci-fi game is content to ignore most of the time. Each planet has their own gravity which can mean a slightly higher jump or literally traversing entire buildings in a single bound. It also dramatically changes combat, turning you into an AC-130 raining death from above, or in zero G, firing a weapon actually propels you backwards. What? What!
Believe me, I understand how AAA video game hype works. We all remember being fooled by early looks at Cyberpunk 2077 or the aforementioned No Man’s Sky. But this feels different, namely because this game comes out in three months. This is not some years-early preview, and Bethesda has famously barely shown us anything about the game to this point outside of a few scarce minutes of gameplay and proofs of concept. What we’re seeing here is what the game is. Nothing is going to be cut or reduced in scale at this point.
There are questions, sure. How many of the thousand planets will have two neat buildings and then you move on? Or is there true exploration to be found? And just how buggy will this game launch, given that A) it’s this absolutely massive and B) it’s a Bethesda game, home of the most voluminous and hilarious bugs in the industry?
But it is hard not to be blown away by what was shown yesterday. Yes, the vistas of the planets and the surprisingly polished-looking combat. But all of these other things that seem almost too good to be true. If they can pull this off, this feels like a game that we have not seen in this industry before, and one that might set a new standard for competitors going forward. At least I hope so.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
