Starfield is Bethesda’s first original RPG in 25 years, a space-faring adventure set in a realistic and aspirational 24th century. We’ve known about the game for a little while – it was first announced in 2018 – but the flow of information has been drip-feed at best.
The latest on Starfield
Bethesda announced that Starfield will launch on September 6 for Xbox and PC platforms. You’ll also be able to play it on Game Pass for console and PC on Day One.
Along with the release date confirmation, Starfield‘s next public appearance will come in the form of a Developer Direct in mid-June around Xbox’s E3/Summer Game Fest conference. Previous trailers have led to much online discussion about the game’s quality and the questions it has yet to answer. The new trailer showcased character creation and build options, weapons, space flight, and a few of the worlds players can expect to visit in the finished game.
Release date
Starfield will release on September 6, 2023 for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and Windows PC.
The game was originally set to launch on November 11, 2022, but was delayed into 2023 to give the development team more time to polish and refine gameplay. Industry speculation suggested at the time that Bethesda wanted to get Starfield out the door in Q1 or Q2 2023, but it seems that it was happy to settle for Q3. This will put the game on shelves well ahead of Christmas, making it the tip of the retail spear heading into the game’s industry’s traditionally busy holiday season.
Gameplay
Story
Little is known about the plot of Starfield right now, and that’s no accident. Bethesda has been protective and paranoid about spoilers for the game’s story getting loose in the world, but has released a short synopsis to give players an idea of its setting and broader strokes.
Starfield is set within The Settled Systems, a section of our solar system that spans some 50 light years. Sometime around the year 2310, tensions between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective collapsed into a conflict that would become known as the Colony War. Starfield is set 20 years after the end of the Colony War, at a moment when the galaxy’s major players have settled into a suspicious, uneasy peace. You are a member of a group of stellar explorers called Constellation.
And that’s it. That’s literally all we know about the story right now. What we can draw from this is that Bethesda is already baking the kind of factional stakes that define its games and make them such interesting RP playgrounds. What would Skyrim have been without factional tensions among the Nords? Starfield is clearly embracing a similar philosophy.
Design
The latest Starfield trailer confirmed that the game has indeed been built in Bethesda’s Creation Engine 2, and will be the first game created in the publisher’s new engine. Bethesda has been publishing games made in its Creation Engine for years, with Fallout 76 being the most recent example. Thus, the move to a new version of the engine is interesting.
Based on the first gameplay footage from Summer Games Fest last year, it seems fair to expect that the game will play very similarly to previous Bethesda RPGs. Previous games made in the Creation Engine have proven fertile ground for modders, and we expect Creation Engine 2 will continue that legacy as well.
Little is known about the game’s core systems just yet, but it’s clear that Fallout-style shooting will have a part to play. Will it allow for a similar grade of weapon customisation as Fallout 4? We got a little look at how the game treats upgrading your starship, and it’s very intricate, so we’re prepared to put that prediction in the Yes column. However, until Bethesda decides to go deeper in depth, we won’t know for sure how things will shake out systemically.
Dialogue systems work similarly to previous Bethesda RPGs, with different responses requiring a greater and greater level of speechcraft or charisma. This indicates that players can expect the kind of deep and customisable character builds that have defined the studio’s previous RPGs.
Speaking of systems, let’s talk about star systems. What we know is that players will be moving between planets during their adventures and that there are more than a thousand worlds to explore. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea to compare Starfield to something like No Man’s Sky in this regard — Starfield will be a heavily curated experience with authored quests, environments and stories, compared to NMS which relies on procedural generation.
Director Todd Howard has also said that Starfield will include some survival elements, but that players shouldn’t expect anything too scary. Mostly these appear to be management of environmental hazards, like plummetting temperatures and managing your O2.
Respeccing your stats no longer means rolling an entirely new character. Starfield includes specific quests that will allow players to respec their characters without going to the hassle of creating a new one and starting their adventure over (though if you do enjoy doing that, by all means go for it).
Most expectations for the main campaign’s length clock in somewhere around the 30-40 hour mark, with obviously hundreds of hours of side content to keep you busy. Returning Bethesda RPG enthusiasts will know that the main quest is usually the last thing on your mind, as a huge part of these games’ appeal lies in getting sidetracked and lost in the sauce.
Trailers
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