Throughout development, and players becoming aware of its existence (a trademark of the name was revealed in 2013), explicit details about Starfield were mostly light. We’ve known it’s a sci-fi game about interplanetary travel from the creators of Skyrim for some time, but during Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase, Bethesda pulled back the curtain in a big way.
Besides showcasing plenty of gameplay covering everything from roaming populous cities to exploring uninhabited planets to fighting on and off spaceships, Bethesda has provided some impressive game story details and customization options.
Like previous Bethesda games, you’ll find plenty of story outside the main path, but during the 45-minute presentation we learned about an organization called Constellation that will drive the game’s main story. The group is a legendary group, believed by many to have expired, who consider themselves the last true explorers of the galaxy. They are trying to answer humanity’s biggest remaining questions. They’ve discovered some strange alien technologies, and for some reason, they seem to be related to you, the player character. The tool spoke to you for some mysterious reason, and as a result Constellation wants you to explore it further. What that means, in terms of player orientation, is that you have to enter a space to figure things out, and basically do whatever you want along the way.
In the Starfield, New Atlantis is a huge populated metropolis under the jurisdiction of the United Colonies. There are other cities under that umbrella, but there are also other major cities that exist outside of that space. These are the Freestar collective planets and cities, which operate more like the Wild West. In fact, shots of these locations look more like Fallout locations than futuristic sci-fi Starfield hubs. And going further, beyond the confines of civilized space, as Bethesda points out, there are unclaimed planets and systems to explore.
Bethesda promises that there are more than 1,000 planets in the game, and as you scan and land on them, random elements affecting the layout and creatures will ensure that your experience on a given planet will be different than that of a friend in their own Starfield. Save the file.
If you’re more interested in designing your own fun than seeing what’s out there in the universe for you, Bethesda has offered great customization options, which start with your player character. The character creation tools have been improved from previous Bethesda efforts, and you can also select your character’s backstory and choose optional traits to further customize your character.
Some unexpected optional traits included choosing your religion, which dictates how you interact with certain groups, or choosing to have a superfan join your crew who could be an obnoxious but helpful stalker (an obvious nod to the oblivion-adoring fan character). You can even choose to send money to your parents home, making them real characters that you can visit.
Besides overhauling the character creation tools to make you look however you want, you can also customize your spaceship, crew, homes, outposts on other planets, and your weapons.
You can buy a spaceship at any port and customize and upgrade it with new parts. But even those individual parts can be customized, upgraded and, in some cases, reconfigured. Bethesda showed ships that looked like your typical cool spaceships, but they also showed ships that looked like animals and a particularly weird ship that looked like an awkward squat mechanism. It took off and flew through space, despite its strange shape.
The customization and building options are an evolution of the tools first introduced in Fallout 4 where players can create their own outposts, but in Starfield you can build from a new overhead perspective and then make smaller design changes by zooming in.
The biggest takeaway from everything Bethesda has shown is that Starfield is a huge game. Looking closely at individual elements in the latest footage, it also showed impressive combat, jetpack maneuverability, and exciting space battles, but it’s hard not to zoom out to try to understand just how massive Starfield is. Bethesda has shared points like how New Atlantis is the largest city they’ve ever built and how many planets there are, but I’m afraid we won’t have a real sense of scale until you get into space and see how far you can fly. It’s a terrifying world, but we’re excited to explore it.