Bethesda has launched a new trailer around its upcoming RPG Starfield. The first in a series of short video docs called Into The Starfield, it’s a roundtable of sorts with key personnel chatting about the game.
The roundtable includes game director Todd Howard, art director Matt Carofano, and studio director Angela Browder. It runs for about seven minutes and is largely a tone-and-tenor piece designed to paint a certain vibe with broad strokes. And the vibe is clear: wonder, curiosity, and adventure.
You could easily argue that these are the core components of every Bethesda RPG, and that that’s a pretty good start. I wouldn’t blame you.t
The trailer doesn’t go into any great depth on the game itself, or even the team’s creative process. There are flashes of in-engine footage, interspersed with concept art. The game itself remains shrouded in a certain amount of mystery.
What Bethesda seems to care very deeply about here is assuring the player that Starfield feels like a Bethesda RPG. Both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 ultimately failed to impress the game’s community and a sense that perhaps Bethesda was drifting away from its fundamentals began to creep in.
Not with Starfield, booms this trailer. We’re back.
Howard enthusiastically speaks about pillars of the Bethesda RPG experience, like what he calls the “step-out moment”. The step-out moment is that special, curated instant where a Bethesda RPG reveals the world before you and turns you loose. The vault door shrieking and shuddering as it rolls aside, revealing the wasteland beyond it. Escaping the dungeon in Oblivion and seeing the rolling hills of Cyrodiil stretch into the distance.
“I like to stay that Starfield actually has two step-out moments,” says Howard. He smiles and says “That’s cryptic.”
Howard says the hint is cryptic, but it doesn’t really feel like it is. The first step out moment is presumably when you catch sight of the spaceship for the first time. The second is when you leave the spaceship for the first time. Sorry to be a buzzkill, but that one seems fairly obvious. Prove me wrong, Todd. Surprise me.
No, but for real though, I love it when you surprise me.
Starfield launches on November 11, 2022, exclusively for Xbox and Windows PC.
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