We still don’t know a whole lot about the world of Starfield, but Friday morning Australian time three videos surfaced that shine a little more light on what we can expect.
The videos were uploaded to the Bethesda YouTube account in early August, although it appears the links only became more publicly known from earlier this week. There’s three videos in total, each featuring developer commentary and concept art for a major city or capital for Starfield‘s various locations.
The first video below, is the capital for the Freestar Collective. Over the course of 30 seconds, you can see a city at the base of some snowy mountains, one that’s walled to keep out alien predators that are supposedly “a cross between a wolf and an alien velociraptor”.
New Atlantis is what will probably take up a good chunk of the player’s time. It’s the capital of the United Colonies, the strongest military and political faction in Starfield. That’s usually a sign that you’ll get plenty of quests, lorebuilding and character development around the area.
The third location is Neon, a “pleasure city” that looks like an offshore oil rig repurposed as a little neon district. “They wanted to catch fish until they discovered a fish with psychotropic properties,” Starfield design director Emil Pagliarulo says.
The drug produced from the fish is called Aurora, and Neon attracts people to the port because even when you can fly around space, you still can’t get high. Fair enough, Bethesda, although now I need to know: can you get high in Starfield?
We’re probably still a ways off from seeing what the actual mechanics of exploration in Starfield looks like, which will answer one of the game’s biggest question: how much can you really explore these cities, the planets they live on, and everything around it? Trading is obviously going to be a huge element of these cities as well, and I’m interested to know whether that experience is more of a menu-based affair like Everspace 2, or if Starfield will go the No Man’s Sky / Star Citizen route by building an entire environment you can walk around in.
Starfield launches November 11, 2022, where it’ll still be a PC and Xbox Series X/S exclusive.
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