Is it possible the most chilling sound an astronaut can hear is not a silent scream in the vacuum of space but a yawn from inside their ship? The interstellar segments of last month's Starfield Direct certainly had me reaching for the pillow, as Bethesda's Skyrim space RPG gave us an image of the final frontier more drowsy than daring.
Exciting things were happening planetside. Futuristic metropolis New Atlantis is crowded with towering high-rises and chatty NPCs, while partner city Neon looks to be a debaucherous cyberpunk den riddled with intrigue and crime. Elsewhere, space pirates, killer robots and quasi-religious zealots stand ready to throwdown in impressively vertical jetpack-laden shootouts, bizarre flora and fauna can be discovered across the surface of 1,000 alien worlds, and blank planetoids function as canvases on which to construct modular personal outposts. In other words, there's a lot going on when you're on the ground. Things to do, places to explore, and people to invariably shoot in the head with tricked-out energy rifles.
