Starfield

Despite being announced before Microsoft bought Bethesda, and having a large window of 'nobody knows', the game is very steadfastly a PC and Xbox exclusive, and ...

The opportunity is obviously long gone at this point, so if you want to play Starfield, Xbox and PC are your only options now. Todd Howard even talked about how limiting the platform would make a better game, stating, "you don’t ever want to leave people out, right? Minecraft didn't stop existing on anything when Mojang got bought by Microsoft. It's not a 'sorry you're never going to get to play anything on PlayStation again'". Many took that to suggest that Starfield might still have a chance on PlayStation. However Xbox marketing general manager Aaron Greenberg quickly shut that talk right down, stating that "Starfield will be launching exclusively on Xbox Series X

Sunday's Xbox showcase was light on news, but showed plenty of games due out in the next year – culminating in Bethesda's long-awaited space RPG Starfield.

But in the absence of any news about Fable, a new Elder Scrolls or other rumoured appearances, the star of the show was definitely Bethesda’s big new sci-fi franchise. Forza Horizon 5 is getting Hot Wheels-based new content on 19 July, and a 40th Anniversary edition of Flight Simulator will add helicopters and gliders as well as other aircraft. Starfield will also feature space exploration and space dogfighting, with players able to fully customise their craft with new weapons and shields, as well as recruiting their own crews.

Bethesda finally gave us a first look at its highly anticipated space-based action RPG Starfield at the Xbox and Bethesda Game Showcase, offering a taste of ...

That's a lot of ground to cover, and I'm worried a lot of that will be empty space. Still, we only got a slight look at Starfield's plentiful rocks and what we can do on them, so only time will tell if hours of exploration will be put to good use. Bethesda has clearly put a lot of time into development, seeing how it was even pushed back to 2023. As Howard shows as an example, you can in the city of Atlantis on planet Jemison, but also explore "anywhere on the planet." There's a lot to enjoy in the official gameplay reveal, and director Todd Howard gave us a hint of just how big the game is: ginormous. Over 1,000 planets, all open for you to explore," Howard says.

The first footage of Starfield suggests the upcoming sci-fi RPG will include that most grounded of all of life's systems: banking.

That Starfield will involve a credit and debt system of some kind shouldn’t be too surprising. The mortgage system was dropped for future Elder Scrolls games, although The Elder Scrolls Online does feature banks that can be used to store gold and items. The feature was briefly alluded to when director Todd Howard walked through the game’s character customization features, and discussed several Personal Traits that can be selected for “unique advantages and disadvantages”.

Yesterday, Xbox and Bethesda showed off actual Starfield gameplay for the first time, along with fresh information about how much larger the game was in ...

That’s fine, but that’s different from the potential Starfield offers with its large, but ultimately limited collection of planets and systems. Yes, it’s true that if you, a solo player, tries to explore every inch of all 1,000 planets to find something hidden and cool, you will probably die of old age before getting through a quarter of them. What this means is that yes, there will be vast regions of these planets that are autopopulated by No Man’s Sky-like mining outcroppings or wildlife, or in Starfield’s case, maybe randomized pirate outposts and things like that, who knows.

Last week Starfield could have been anything. But after last night's Xbox & Bethesda showcase, it became clear that Starfield is very much a Bethesda game—a ...

Starfield may be missing the absolute scale of a No Man's Sky or Elite, but the idea of nipping around in ugly, utilitarian starships (fully crewed and customizable) and setting up shop on a barren desert world is by far the thing that turned me all the way around. Starfield is still going to be a blockbuster tentpole RPG where choices don't really matter and your gun upgrades with a .5% crit perk. No Man's Sky is often gorgeous, but there are a whole load of stinkers in a universe of 18 quintillion planets. Hell yeah, I sure hope there isn't! I hope we get a thousand Mass Effect 1 Mako sandbox planets with nothing to do but vibe on. As soon as the world becomes a known quantity, my interest drops off fast as I'm left with only half-baked combat encounters and serviceable-at-best stories. The basic argument is that Starfield would be more interesting with 10 hand-crafted planets than 1,000 presumably proc-genned worlds.

Starfield's promise of 1000 planets suggests the game will have a lot of breadth, but no depth.

You hear of one player finding a certain NPC, or completing a particular quest in a specific way, and then you want to recreate that in your own game. If you think 1,000 planets is too much, the solution is to trim some down to make the others dense, not to have humans create the skeleton and then build an extremely expensive process to throw meat on the bone - different chunks of meat for each player, wowee! 1,000 planets is just far too many, and while I know they will be procedurally generated to an extent, that only addresses the technical challenges of making so many planets, not the tiresome act of playing the game. Starfield is the first fruit of this new tactic, and it looks exactly how I would expect Xbox's first show of strength to look: way too expensive, far too big, and incredibly generic in an attempt to appeal to the widest possible audience. While it currently seems to be winning over hearts and minds with the breadth and depth of Game Pass, Xbox has always relied on its heavy-hitters (most famously Halo) in order to keep it in the game. Valiant challengers, becoming more than the sum of their parts, staying afloat with a lot of good offerings but only mounting a serious challenge when one of the few greats in their roster comes out to play.

Get a headstart on creating your spacefarer by checking out our list of all the Starfield traits revealed so far, from alien DNA to managing a space ...

(Can’t be combined with any other faction allegiance trait.) (Can’t be combined with Extrovert.) Have you recently flown the nest, or are you an orphan settled on a distant moon? It also provided us with an early indicator of how Starfield’s traits can be combined (or not, in some cases), and the ways in which selecting them can impact gameplay. But 10% of all the money you earn is deducted automatically and sent to them. Alongside your character’s background and skills, Starfield traits offer a range of unique advantages and disadvantages, depending on which ones you pick.

With Todd Howard taking to the stage to offer insight into elements such as the size and scope of the adventure, customization options, character creation, and ...

As Howard explained, you'll be able to build up your own outposts which "act as home away from home for survival and resource generation". Starfield lets you place down a variety of different structures and you're free to choose where and how you build it. Naturally and most excitingly, you'll be able to fly the ship you create. When Starfield was first announced, Bethesda said you can create any character you want, and it looks like we'll be able to do just that. During the sequence with the scanner, you can see a little prompt to activate photo mode at the bottom of the screen. As we explore and survey each world we encounter, it looks like we'll be able to use a scanner device to locate and identify resources, and flora and fauna that's native to the environment. The Starfield gameplay gave us a sense of the size and scope of the space-set RPG. Todd Howard revealed that there will be 1,000 planets and 100 systems to explore.

Bethesda promising over 1000 worlds in its sci-fi RPG sounds like quantity over quality.

The size will either help Starfield feel like a generation-defining open-world RPG the way Skyrim was a decade ago, or a game that again demonstrates the folly of going big and adding more just because you can. “If you can recruit people from the 1,000 worlds, how many of those people are going to have fleshed-out stories? More often than not, the excess content feels like filler, or invites developers to crunch to get a game out the door, and sometimes both. And yet Starfield seems to be flirting with all of the same potential disappointments. Instead of mountains in the distance being climbable, this time it’s entire planets throughout the galaxy being visitable. Yet Howard decided to return to it while showing off the first gameplay for Starfield, Skyrim’s much-anticipated sci-fi successor, which has invited unkind comparisons to the disastrous 2016 launch of mega-sized space game No Man’s Sky.

The 2022 Xbox and Bethesda Showcase was full of highlights, but the show was arguably stolen by the gameplay trailer for Bethesda's upcoming sci-fi RPG, ...

Procedural generation has come a long way since Bethesda used it in The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, and while the company hasn’t always relied on that technology as much as they may soon need to, odds are Starfield will depend on procedural generation for the lion’s share of its planets. In a 2020 Develop: Brighton Conference interview, Howard implied that while Starfield (and The Elder Scrolls 6) will feature quite a few hand-created locations, Bethesda will use procedural generation to help create the remaining portions of the game’s landscapes. Perhaps the landscape creators will build those planets entirely, or maybe they will create cities and dungeons tied to missions and the main story and then ask a program to help fill in the gaps.

Here are details about every Starfield background we've spotted so far, from bio entries to all of the starting skills you get when you begin your ...

They’re not the only way you can customise your character, though. Once you choose your Starfield background, there is no way to change it. The Colony War may have made implants and upgrades available to veterans, but you once saw a greater future. From Neon to New Atlantis, the megacorps stand as monuments to power, prestige and profit. Currently, there are 16 backgrounds that we know about, and five that we have details about. Some may act friendly towards you or be reassured that a mission will be successful because of your past, while others may be more hostile if they learn about the company you used to keep.

It might be more melee damage, extra health, carrying capacity and so on. It makes these choices more than just flavor to flesh out your Starfield role play - ...

There's also extra laser weapon damage which, if Starfield works anything like, Fallout, means that class of weapon damages mechanical enemies more. It suggests the pistol buff is there more for a last resort as you'll hopefully be sneaking and talking you way through problems instead. What's not clear at the moment is if these buffs are a starter boosts to thing you can later level up, or fixed value perks.

We finally got a good long look at Bethesda's space RPG Starfield over the weekend. The meaty, 15-minute Starfield gameplay trailer featured lots of details ...

And the nice thing about a silent protagonist is they can still speak inside my head (thanks to imagination) and they'll sound exactly how I want them to. When I'm immersed in a role, it can be jarring if I don't like my character's voice or even their inflection when all their lines have been recorded by an actor. The lack voice lines for our Starfield astronauts feels like a course correction from Fallout 4, which featured a fully voice player character, and this is sure to bring out some differing opinions among players.

Starfield's first gameplay trailer was revealed over the weekend, and it's given rise to a mix of excitement, disappointment, and plenty of speculation.

We've got a ship, a robot, an introduction to the guild, and the beginning of a main story quest. In Starfield, it's a bit more scientific: You visit a genetics facility and have them re-stir your DNA. We pretty much know Starfield doesn't work that way because they would have shown it and said it: There's no word developers like more than "seamless." At a few points in the trailer you can see the prompt "X" to land, and every landing we see looks like a cutscene or in-engine cinematic. If you really want them to have a voice, you'll have to make one up in your head. Not only is it nice that you're helping support your parents (and that you even have parents), but the idea of visiting your character's folks is strangely appealing. Once upon a time humans looked up at the stars and decided there were gods up there, and even now that we're traveling among the stars that belief hasn't gone away. Not everyone loves the idea of a silent protagonist, and in some RPGs it's nice for your character to be fully voiced. But 10% of all the money you earn is deducted automatically and sent to them." Best of all, it could be a feature of bounty hunter missions, where you dock with and board a ship to take out the crew and their leader in a firefight. I'm sure Bethesda didn't include a full simulation of Earth in Starfield—that would involve cramming the entirety of Microsoft Flight Simulator into the game—but the idea of visiting Earth is an intriguing one. Starfield's first gameplay trailer was revealed over the weekend, and it's given rise to a mix of excitement, disappointment, and plenty of speculation. But Brennanthenerd on Reddit (opens in new tab) spotted the Sol system—our solar system—among the tiny pips on the galaxy map, too.

Starfield is, naturally, set in space where players will take on the role of a last group of explorers. Described as “Skyrim in space,” by game director Todd ...

You can land and explore freely on all the planets in the system of Starfield, and Bethesda says there are more than 1,000 planets all open for players to explore. You can also build your own space ships, choose your crew members, and completely customize the look and layout of the ship. You can build your own outpost for resource generation across the planets, and you can hire characters you meet to keep them up and running. You meet them in the capital city of New Atlantis, where you’ll discover that this group of explorers is hunting for artifacts across the systems of Starfield. What are these artifacts being used for? You’ll pick three traits to customize for your character and the skill system will include unlocks and separate ranks. Powered by Bethesda’s new Creation Engine 2, the first Starfield gameplay shows a player freely roaming around in both first- and third-person views, collecting resources, and disturbing creatures that are also foraging on Starfield’s many planets.

Starfield dropped its most comprehensive trailer yet during the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase on Sunday. It includes a look at combat, character generation ...

“These decisions are hard on teams making the games & our fans,” Spencer wrote on social media at the time. The lengthy trailer, shown during a joint presentation with other Xbox Game Studios projects, and timed to coincide with the Summer Games Fest, also established the game’s storyline. In a presentation livestreamed on Sunday, game director Todd Howard lifted the cover off the highly anticipated game to reveal flyable, customizable starships as well as 100 star systems and more than 1,000 different worlds to explore.

Starfield is the biggest Bethesda RPG yet, but is there enough room in the game for any multiplayer?

One of the best things about Bethesda RPGs is that they allow you to lose yourself in a world free of player-generated distractions, and it certainly seems like that’s what Starfield will try to offer when the game is released sometime next year. Finally, since Starfield is coming to PC, there is a very good chance that someone will inevitably create some kind of multiplayer mod for it. Of course, hearing that the game is that large made quite a few people wonder if Starfield will actually let you explore that massive universe with friends via some kind of multiplayer or co-op mode.

A lot of eager gamers got their wish as long-awaited space RPG Starfield finally showed off some gameplay footage today at the Xbox and Bethesda Showcase.

Fallout in space has some appeal, and a while ago I wrote that I'm glad it's coming out before The Elder Scrolls 6. We didn't get any sort of feel for characters you meet—I would have loved to see a single, unbroken conversation with an NPC instead of the combat segments—or what the planets will have to keep us occupied beyond gathering resources and shooting alien critters. And as Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 have settlements, you'll be able to build multiple outposts on different planets in Starfield, hire NPCs to work there, and use your outposts to generate resources. There's a silly-yet-futuristic version of Bethesda's lockpicking game as the player opens a weapon case to retrieve a gun, and while it's not shown in the trailer there are lots of tables, desks, cabinets, and boxes in the lab, so I imagine Fallout's junk-gathering system will play a role. Scanning a ship brings up a radio transmission from Vasco (who I assume is still minding your ship) informing you of the ship-owner's faction: in this case, pirates. There's also some scanning and mining for iron with a laser, again, reminiscent of No Man's Sky (though plenty of futuristic survival games do this too).

Starfield received a new gameplay trailer today, and some fans have started comparing it to No Man's Sky and Skyrim. Following Starfield and Bethesda boss ...

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, as also revealed via a Twitter search was that some people are happy to see Starfield giving off glimmers of the two other action-adventure games. Finally, we also found out that Starfield lets you build and fly your own spaceships, which are also customizable. A number of Twitter users began sharing the phase as an obvious nod to how the latest Starfield trailer gives off major No Man’s Sky and Skyrim vibes.

The very first Starfield gameplay trailer is here, courtesy of today's Xbox/Bethesda showcase. Skip advert. Advertisement. Earlier today at the Xbox and ...

The date would've marked the second Bethesda RPG to launch on the day, after Skyrim originally launched on November 11 all the way back in 2011. Of course, this all follows hot on the heels of Starfield being delayed out of its original release date of November 11 later this year. Earlier today at the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase, the latter developer finally pulled back the curtain on the new RPG. The gameplay reveal for Starfield showed off space pirates, the mysterious moon of Kreet in May 2333, and what looks a lot like No Man's Sky's scanner.

Xbox + Bethesda's Showcase this morning served to highlight gameplay first looks for a lot of games coming to the platform and Xbox Game Pass.

Based on these early looks, the gunplay looks surprisingly rock-solid, while jetting about on your jetpack looks like a ball. We also got a look at the game’s character creator, while Todd Howard confirmed that players will be able to fully build their own spaceship which can be flown. Based on the gameplay shown in the trailer, Starfield does look a lot like Fallout and feels reminiscent of Bethesda Games Studios’ other products.