Spoiler Warning: Although there are no major story spoilers for Starfield, spoilers are still present for the game and some of its systems.
Yes, we’re talking Starfield again! Bethesda’s upcoming open-galaxy sci-fi role-playing game is absolutely my most-anticipated game right now, and there’s a lot to look forward to. There are also a few points of concern! I’ve covered both here on the website already, but today I thought it could be fun to put together a “wishlist.” We’re going to talk about some of my biggest concerns for Starfield as well as some possible inclusions that haven’t been announced. We’re also going to look at some of the game’s announced features and mechanics and consider how I’d like them to be used.
The major caveat I always give when putting together a wishlist is this: I have no “insider information.” I’m not trying to claim that anything listed below *is* going to be part of Starfield – no matter how much I might want it to be! I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that the game Bethesda has developed will be plenty of fun to play regardless of whether my “wishes” end up being granted!
And as always, all of this is the wholly subjective opinion of one person. If I miss something that seems obvious to you, or if you disagree with all of my ideas, that’s totally okay! There’s enough room in the gaming community and the Starfield fandom for differences of opinion and respectful disagreement.
Now that that’s out of the way, there are a few points from the recent Starfield presentation that were left unclear, with features I’d like to see included in the game that weren’t announced or discussed in detail. There are also some concerns about the game – from its marketing and hype bubble to Bethesda’s reputation. Let’s jump into the list and look at each of my wishes in turn.
Wish #1:
No microtransactions and especially no paid mods.
I was alarmed to see that the special edition of Starfield comes with a handful of character costumes that aren’t going to be part of the main game. Pre-order bonuses are nothing new, of course… but I fear that this is just the canary in the coal mine; a harbinger of some potentially aggressive in-game monetisation.
In a free-to-play game, I’m much more forgiving when it comes to microtransactions. They mustn’t be exploitative, of course, and prices still need to be measured and reasonable, but a game that doesn’t charge its players anything up-front has to make its money back somehow. Starfield will be a fully-priced game, retailing for £60 here in the UK or $70 in the United States, and that means microtransactions are absolutely unacceptable.
I was astonished by the scale of Diablo IV’s in-game marketplace. That game has online features, but it can be a wholly single-player experience – and it’s charging players £20/$25 in some cases for character skins and other cosmetic items. To me, that’s so far beyond the pale that it almost feels laughable.
Bethesda is one of the pioneers of this kind of nonsense, too, with Oblivion’s notorious horse armour DLC in 2006 paving the way for this kind of in-game monetisation in single-player titles. Bethesda has also tried to monetise mods, with multiple attempts to get the “Creation Club” off the ground in both Skyrim and Fallout 4. Paid mods could (and should) be the subject of an entire article one day – but for now, suffice to say it’s something I want to be kept as far away from Starfield as possible.
Wish #2:
Customisable spaceship interiors.
Bethesda showed off spaceship customisation extensively at the showcase – and the feature looks amazing. But what wasn’t shown was to what extent the interior of spaceships can be modified and customised… or if that’s even going to be possible at all. Part of me thinks that, if it were possible to make any sort of modification to a vessel’s interior, Bethesda would have shown it off and talked about it. So I suspect this particular wish may not be granted.
We saw a Bethesda developer depositing a large number of sandwiches that she’d pilfered onto a table aboard her ship – so it’s obviously possible to place some in-game items aboard a spaceship and have them remain there. But whether that extends to things like furniture is unclear.
At the very least, I’d like to see basic options for things like colours being included. If I want a hot pink spaceship for my gay-as-hell pirate – and if you know me, you know that’s exactly what I want – then it would feel a bit disappointing if the inside of that ship was just a boring white or grey colour.
As far back as Morrowind it was fun to put items on shelves and tables, to decorate a home or cave and make it feel a bit more personalised. If Starfield only gives us pre-made pieces to snap together, with no possibility for further customisation, part of the role-playing experience will be lost. We know that the interior of outposts on planets can be customised – at least to an extent – so I hope spaceships can be too. If not, this should be a priority for the game’s first free update!
Wish #3:
A polished, bug-free launch – or a delay if that won’t be possible.
In 2022, I praised the decision to delay Starfield. If the game wasn’t going to be ready for prime-time in November of last year, a delay was the only thing Microsoft and Bethesda could have done. But Starfield’s hype bubble has inflated massively since the showcase, and with a release date at the beginning of September seemingly set in stone, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to launch the game whether it’s ready or not.
This year alone we’ve seen far too many bug-riddled, broken, unfinished games pushed out too early by greedy publishers. Microsoft and Bethesda are not immune from this, either, with Redfall being an absolute abomination only a few weeks ago. Given the state of other Bethesda titles when they were released – Fallout 76 most notably – there are reasons to be concerned. Starfield is, for me, a game firmly in the “wait for the reviews” column.
Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty was recently quoted as saying that Starfield would have “the fewest bugs of any Bethesda game ever shipped” if it were released today… and that’s a bold claim that he will be held accountable for. It’s easy for any developer worth their salt to put together a “vertical slice” of gameplay that runs well and is polished, and even the worst and most incomplete, broken games can look decent in their own marketing material. All that we’ve seen of Starfield so far has been promotional bumf released by Bethesda, so until the game is actually in the hands of real players, we can’t be sure of its condition.
There is a lot riding on Starfield for Bethesda; the company is looking to recover its reputation after Fallout 76. But there’s a lot riding on the game’s success for Xbox and Microsoft, too. If Starfield goes the way of Anthem or even Cyberpunk 2077, the situation may not be salvageable… and that could lead to serious long-term problems for Bethesda and its parent company. If Starfield isn’t good enough by September, then for god’s sake delay it!
Wish #4:
Small towns and settlements to visit beyond the main cities.
At time of writing we know of four major settlements in Starfield: Akila City in the Freestar Collective, the pleasure city of Neon, New Atlantis in the United Colonies, and Cydonia on Mars. We also caught a glimpse of a space station that looked quite large, as well as a location called “Red Mile” that we don’t know much about yet. But that’s all.
In Skyrim there were nine cities, five smaller towns, and a number of settlements and farmsteads scattered across the map. Fallout 4 likewise had several larger and smaller towns, and even Morrowind had a number of smaller places to visit outside of the main settlements. I hope that some of Starfield’s planets will have colonies or small towns to encounter, especially if they aren’t tied to the main quest. I hope that both the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective will have other settlements outside of their capital cities. And I hope that these locations will be visually interesting and fun to visit!
This really speaks to a bigger concern that I have about Starfield – namely that the game’s massive open-galaxy map could feel incredibly empty. Without these smaller settlements and the people that live there, Starfield risks feeling very under-populated. If the galaxy only contains four cities and a couple of thousand people… the population relative to the size of the map will be completely out-of-balance.
Bethesda has shown off a handful of locations, like an abandoned mine populated by hostile NPCs, but I’m looking for settlements akin to Morrowind’s Pelagiad or Fallout 3′s Grayditch – small towns with a few characters to encounter that go a long way to making their respective worlds feel lived-in and complete.
Wish #5:
Heads-up display options.
One visual choice that I wasn’t wild about came during some of the first-person spaceflight sections shown off in the Starfield showcase. A well-designed cockpit could be seen, complete with buttons, screens, and readouts… but clumsily slapped on top of that was the game’s HUD in transparent boxes.
For me, this detracted from the way those spaceflight sections looked. I’d love to be able to move things like power management to those screens directly, and to see my character pushing buttons that correspond with the actions I’m taking. Failing that, I hope there’s at least an option to minimise or hide the HUD so it doesn’t get in the way.
This is less of an issue on the ground, at least from what we saw at the showcase. And a good heads-up display is important; the HUD contains vital information like the amount of ammo you have left, the state of your health, a mini-map, and more. But during those spaceflight sections in particular, I felt that the HUD was clunky and got in the way.
The best-case scenario would be to move the HUD options directly to one or two of the screens in the cockpit. That would be fantastic to see! But at the very least if there could be options to hide this during first-person spaceflight, that would go a long way to helping with that sense of immersion that Starfield is going for.
Wish #6:
Difficulty and accessibility options.
Say it with me, folks: difficulty options are an accessibility feature! Many modern games offer things like large text, colour-blindness settings, motion sickness settings, and more. One of the best games I’ve played in terms of the sheer number of accessibility features was Control, but other titles like Grounded have been pioneers, with options to dial back the fear factor in some of its bugs and arachnids.
Accessibility extends to difficulty, too, and while I certainly hope that Starfield will pose a challenge for folks who need or want that, I hope there will be options to dial back the difficulty to allow those of us who don’t want to die every six seconds to have an enjoyable time! There’s hope in that regard: Skyrim and Fallout 4 both had decent difficulty options. The addition of a “hard-core” mode with permadeath could be fun for some players, too… but it definitely won’t be something I choose to activate!
A role-playing game needs to be adaptable, allowing players with different ability levels to participate. Bethesda has usually made an effort, at least, to get this right – but modern games allow for many more options in that regard. It should be possible to dial down the difficulty of combat, for instance, while maintaining a higher difficulty level for something like lockpicking or puzzle-solving.
There’s been a trend in some modern games, pioneered by the likes of the Dark Souls series, toward a punishing level of difficulty. That’s fine for some players – but it would deny Starfield to millions more, myself included. There are games I’ve genuinely wanted to play that were denied to me because they were totally inaccessible – I hope Starfield won’t be among them.
Wish #7:
Pets!
It’s already been confirmed that we won’t be able to “mount” any of the wild animals we encounter in Starfield. That’s fine by me, as mounts and vehicles weren’t things I was expecting. But it would be really sweet and cute if we could get pets for our spaceships and outposts!
These could either be purchasable from in-game vendors, perhaps with Earth animals like cats or dogs being available. Or, as an alternative, tamed alien animals that we encounter out in the game’s open world. We’ve already seen that players can choose an ability to pacify aggressive animals – it’s not much of a leap from that to having a tamed, domesticated pet!
If this isn’t something included in the base game, it’s absolutely something that Bethesda should consider for an update or even as a standalone piece of DLC. Other games have done this: from Commander Shepard’s hamster and fish tank in Mass Effect 2 through to horses in Red Dead Redemption II and the mini-games required to properly care for them. It’s possible to pet cats and dogs in games like Ghostwire Tokyo, and Bethesda’s own Fallout 4 gave players a pet dog to accompany them!
This is pure fantasy, of course, as it’s a feature that hasn’t been announced or even teased. But the ability to acquire a pet would add a lot to the pure role-playing immersion of a game like Starfield.
Wish #8:
Make those traits and backgrounds matter.
The Starfield showcase highlighted both character backgrounds and optional traits – all of which seem like they have the potential to really shake up the way Starfield plays. Some traits add wholly new characters or change the way different factions will react to the player character, and that’s great… I just hope that it matters in a meaningful way.
In Cyberpunk 2077, the much-vaunted “life paths” that a player could choose ultimately had very little impact on gameplay. Outside of a short prologue, which was different for each, there was one solitary quest – and a short one at that – midway through the game, and a couple of places where different dialogue options could appear. That was it. There really wasn’t much to Cyberpunk’s life paths, certainly not enough to add much by way of replayability.
Starfield needs to get this right. If I can choose to be a chef who frequently goes home to visit their parents, then playing the game with those options needs to feel substantially different from choosing to be a gangster with a bounty on their head. If these things will only have a superficial impact on gameplay, then they won’t really matter – and that will damage the sense of immersion and make starting a second save file feel less than worthwhile.
If these traits and backgrounds in their various combinations don’t matter as much as Bethesda’s marketing has suggested, then they may as well be scrapped and Starfield could have a Skyrim-style class system instead. It’s hard to see how all of the fifteen or more different backgrounds could each be given their own unique questlines and extensive dialogue options… but an effort has to be made!
Wish #9:
A reason to explore – and to keep exploring.
Recent interviews by Starfield’s director Todd Howard have confirmed that approximately 10% of the game’s 1,000 planets will have life on them. That leaves 900+ planets being lifeless, but with resources to collect and possibly a handful of ruins or abandoned outposts to discover.
Starfield needs to ensure that players have a reason to explore these worlds. Forced scarcity of resources won’t cut it – and could easily become frustrating. If the game’s Constellation organisation is focused on exploration, then there has to be a reason why they’re pushing the player to explore these planets. Seeking out ancient artefacts could be part of that – but again, there will be a lot of planets that don’t have any. What reason will players have to visit these worlds?
I think it’s possible that DLC will add new locations, crashed spaceships, ruined colonies, and much more to some of these empty planets… assuming that Bethesda will be in a position to continue to support Starfield post-release. That’s a longer-term solution, though, and doesn’t really get away from the immediate problem of what could be a map that’s simply too large for the amount of content that will be contained in it.
This is one of my biggest worries, to be honest. I have no doubt that Bethesda will have created some wonderful characters, some fun quests, and some engaging storylines… but will that content be too thinly spread? Or will most of it be concentrated in a handful of big cities and populated planets? Fallout 76 felt big and empty; an open-world with nothing to do and no reason to explore it beyond admiring the scenery. I hope that Starfield hasn’t fallen into the same trap.
Wish #10:
Exciting and enjoyable combat.
I’ve usually enjoyed combat encounters in The Elder Scrolls games, particularly melee combat with swords, axes, spears, and the like. But Bethesda’s Fallout duology hasn’t always gotten its gunplay right. In Bethesda’s single-player Fallout titles, the VATS system paused the game to allow for targeting, and that went a long way to covering up what was pretty mediocre shooting and gunplay.
When VATS couldn’t be implemented in Fallout 76 – because of the game’s multiplayer nature – Bethesda’s sub-par shooting was laid bare. What we’ve seen of Starfield’s gunplay looks impressive so far, but again that comes with the caveat that everything we’ve been shown is carefully-edited marketing material that may not ultimately prove to be representative of the finished game.
Todd Howard confirmed that Bethesda has worked with fellow ZeniMax studio id Software on elements of Starfield, and the famed developer of the Doom series – including the recent highly-praised titles Doom and Doom Eternal – would definitely have a lot to offer. Some of Starfield’s shooting looked to draw inspiration from those recent Doom games.
At the end of the day, all we really need is for shooting to be competent. It won’t be the main focus of Starfield for the most part, but when combat encounters arise, they need to be basically fun to play and not frustrating! In a role-playing game with different playstyles and options, different kinds of weapons need to behave differently from one another, too.
So that’s it!
Those are ten of my Starfield wishes!
In an ideal world, the game would do everything I want! But even if none of the things we’ve talked about today come to pass, I’m still hoping for a fun and enjoyable game. Maybe Starfield won’t be the best game of all-time… but as long as it has some of that Bethesda magic, and some decent systems and mechanics that don’t get in the way, I daresay it’ll be good enough to keep my attention and focus for a time this autumn.
I really am trying not to get too carried away. It’s hard, though, because I don’t think I’ve been this excited about a game since Bethesda’s own Morrowind more than twenty years ago. If you asked me to describe my idea of an “ideal game,” many of the things I’d choose to include have already been confirmed to be part of Starfield.
In a broader sense, Starfield feels like the game I’ve been waiting decades to play, ever since I first played games like Star Trek: Starship Creator, Star Fox on the Super Nintendo, and first-person shooters like the original Doom, System Shock, and Elite Force. I’m trying not to place too high a bar on Starfield… but I can’t deny how excited I am!
Every time I think I’ve ran out of things to say about Starfield, I find at least one more thing to comment on! So I hope you’ll stay tuned here on the website, because I may have something else to say about the game before too long. When Starfield is released, I’ll also do my best to share my first impressions and my thoughts about the game and its various systems and gameplay mechanics, so definitely check back for all of that later in the year.
Until then, I hope this wishlist was a bit of fun!
Starfield will be released on the 6th of September 2023 for PC and Xbox Series S/X consoles. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. Some promo images and screenshots used above courtesy of Bethesda. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 