It’s the game Bethesda has been thinking about and dreamily planning for 25 years: a massive role-playing adventure, set not just on one world like the multimillion- selling Fallout and Skyrim titles, but across an entire galaxy of more than 1,000 detailed planets. In a 40-minute video presentation given as part of Sunday’s Xbox Showcase in LA, the development team working under director Todd Howard spelt out its wildly ambitious project in detail – so, so much detail.
You play as a member of the Constellation, a famed group of space explorers who have stumbled across a strange artefact that hints at an ancient alien intelligence, or perhaps even god. That’s the main quest-line, but players can also discover myriad side quests and mini-missions handed out by a vast number of non-player characters. The game starts in the sprawling utopian city of New Atlantis on Alpha Centauri, but as play progresses, you move farther away from the peaceful United Colonies, and into the territory of the Independent Coalition of Star Systems, a ragtag frontier of cyberpunk worlds. Outside those lies uncharted space, teeming with hostile factions.
Combat has been a key focus, with the team looking to improve the sometimes floaty, bullet-sponge feel of RPG shoot-outs. (This is something that Xbox chief Phil Spencer was keen to emphasise: “I’ve worked on some bigger sci-fi RPGs in my past and I’ve always felt like the gunplay kind of didn’t always live up to what I wanted in a game. But Starfield plays really well as an action game, even though it’s this deep RPG, and I really enjoy that.”) It promises fast, solid first-person shooter-style encounters, featuring shotguns, SMGs, sniper rifles and energy weapons. Space battles are also very much a thing. It’s possible to attack and then board other ships, fight the crew and finally claim the craft and all its contents as your own.
In-depth personalisation is set to be a major element. Players get to use a vast character creation toolkit (apparently the same tech used by the developers to build the game’s non-player characters), allowing intricate control over appearance and clothing – Bethesda scanned dozens of real faces from a diverse range of ages and ethnicities to get skin tones and features correct. There are different backgrounds to choose from, such as combat medic, diplomat or chef, allowing you to construct a biography for the character, and traits such as introvert and empath colour your interactions with NPCs.
It’s also possible to customise weapons and spacecraft, adding hundreds of different upgrades and aesthetic frills. During the presentation, Bethesda showed off one craft designed to resemble a giant mech. While exploring the galaxy, you’re also able to build personalised outposts on any planet you fancy. These can be homes, but also mines set up with their own AI crew to gather a planet’s resources while you do other things.
The base-building is highly reminiscent of UK studio Hello Games’s ongoing space exploration epic No Man’s Sky, and it’s certainly not the only similarity between the two games, which was perhaps inevitable considering their shared theme of planetary exploration. Starfield players can use a laser to mine resources from the environment, scan indigenous lifeforms to collect zoological data, and planets can be analysed from orbit to suss out their mineral content.
But of course what Starfield is adding is that rich abundance of narrative strands that Bethesda brings. It’s also a more edgy, realistic universe. The designers call the aesthetic “Nasa punk”, combining the chunky, analogue romance of early space exploration with sci-fi craft that look dented and lived-in. From looming cityscapes to rolling alien landscapes rich with flora, detail is the common theme – even if there have been controversial compromises: the game is set to run at 30fps, which has angered some players used to double that frame-rate from the Xbox Series X console. Yet it’s hard to complain when you see things such as real-time global illumination, which dynamically colours a planet’s light levels depending on its position relative to the sun and the chemical makeup of its atmosphere.
In a year that has already seen Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom provide players with an enormous undertaking, Starfield is a supermassive black hole of a game – it’ll suck you in and distort time. But the point, says Howard, is to give players the choice to pursue the experience they want, and to contribute to the universe. “We like to make games that reward players for their time investment,” he says. “We want to give people that freedom. That’s what’s special about video games as entertainment. We feel with Starfield, more than anything we’ve done, the more you give to it, the more it’s gonna give back.”
• Keith Stuart attended a press trip to the Xbox showcase in Los Angeles with other journalists. His travel and accommodation costs were met by Microsoft
