Spoiler Warning: Although there are no major story spoilers for Starfield, minor spoilers may be present. This article also uses screenshots and promotional artwork of the game.
A few days ago I shared my thoughts on the recent Starfield showcase, which was a standalone presentation that followed Xbox’s summer event. I’m beyond excited for the game’s release, as this kind of open-galaxy, retro-sci-fi adventure almost feels like it was tailor-made for me! Today, as a follow-up to that article, I want to go into a bit more detail about a few of the things that I’m most excited about in Starfield.
This article also serves as the counterpoint to a piece that I wrote a couple of days ago in which I went into detail about some of my worries and concerns about Starfield. These points of concern haven’t wiped away the excitement – but the excitement and hype that I feel for this game is, to an extent anyway, balanced out by some fears that I have. If you want to read about my points of concern, you can find that article by clicking or tapping here.
First of all, let’s talk about Starfield’s aesthetic, its visual style, and some of the design choices that we’ve seen so far. This retro-futuristic style has been described by Bethesda as “NASA-punk;” a blend of classic NASA-inspired designs with elements of the dystopian cyberpunk genre. I absolutely adore this choice, and some of the NASA-inspired spacesuits, spaceship interiors, and other pieces of technology look fantastic. Visual styles are very much subject to personal taste – but for someone who was inspired by NASA’s space shuttle missions as a young kid in the ’80s, and who read as many books about spaceships and astronauts as I could find, these designs couldn’t be more perfect.
The “NASA-punk” designs feel like a natural evolution of some of NASA’s recent and contemporary designs. The robotic companion Vasco, for example, is clearly inspired by the likes of the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers. The interior of the Frontier spaceship, particularly its cockpit and airlock, feels very close in design to the space shuttle, the International Space Station, and contemporary rockets like SpaceX’s Dragon II.
Starfield’s designs also incorporate elements from other sci-fi settings. There are elements of “NASA-punk” that remind me of the likes of Firefly, Farscape, and even the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises. There’s also a Disney feel to some of these designs – and if you’ve been to Disney World and ridden rides like Spaceship Earth or Space Mountain, perhaps you’ll pick up on some of that, as I did. Although Starfield is brand-new, some of these visual and aesthetic choices feel quite nostalgic in that sense!
Starfield is standing on its own two feet with this “NASA-punk” style, though. There are influences and inspirations from both the real world and other sci-fi properties, but Bethesda has blended them together and put its own distinctive stamp on them.
But there’s more to Starfield than one visual style. Beyond the Constellation organisation and the United Colonies we saw the Freestar Collective and the city of Neon, both of which appear to have their own distinct styles of dress and architecture. For me, this harkens back to the likes of Morrowind, where different parts of the game’s world were populated by a diverse array of factions and races, each of which had their own styles. This was still present to a degree in Oblivion, but was much less obvious in the likes of Skyrim and Bethesda’s Fallout duology.
The Freestar Collective looks to have a distinct western inspiration, with cowboy hats and even an old-fashioned pistol duel being shown during the Starfield showcase. This could lead to some incredibly fun moments on the “frontier” of space, and I’m just in love with the “rough and ready cowboy” look of some of these characters and locales. Again, this is something that reminds me of my childhood, of playing “cowboys” with a toy six-shooter and dressing up in Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap! Yes, I really did own a replica coonskin cap as a kid.
The city of Neon feels like a ton of fun, too. A kind of “space Vegas,” where anything goes and all forms of pleasure are available – for a price, of course! Neon reminded me of places like Mass Effect’s Omega, Star Trek: Picard’s Freecloud, and other such “outside the rule of law” settlements that are a common enough trope in sci-fi stories. Its unique origin as a former fishing platform-turned-drug haven helps it to stand out, though.
Beyond the major settlements that we’ve seen there are bound to be smaller places to visit, either colonies on planets or spaceships and stations out in space. We caught a brief glimpse of a couple of these in the showcase, and I’m absolutely eager to see more! Bethesda’s past games have often had multiple settlements to visit, so I’m sure there will be several hitherto-unseen places to go.
One feature I cannot wait to get stuck into is spaceship customisation. The idea of being able to create and customise my very own spaceship already sounded like something special – but knowing that I can also recruit a crew and then head out into a Bethesda-created open galaxy… it’s beyond exciting, and again this feels like a feature that was created from the ground up with me and my tastes in mind!
There are multiple methods for… shall we say, “acquiring” a spaceship, too. It sounds like the player character will get access to their own spaceship fairly early on in the game – and this ship can then be modified at will. But there are other options: purchasing a spaceship is possible, but so is stealing one! I don’t know whether it will be possible to land on a random planet or go to a spaceport and simply fly away in someone else’s ship – but after defeating an opponent in ship-to-ship combat, it’s possible to board their vessel, kill the crew, and claim it.
I’m absolutely in love with the idea of becoming a space pirate! And even if piracy isn’t going to be the focus of a playthrough, I can definitely see how hijacking and then selling a spaceship (or at least parts of a spaceship) could be an incredibly lucrative way of making a ton of money in-game. High-risk, sure… but with a potentially massive payday at the end!
In the showcase, Bethesda employees had designed some wonderfully creative spaceships of their own. And this was an easily-missed feature that Bethesda didn’t draw attention to, but it seems almost certain that it’s possible to re-name spaceships, too. I’m already thinking of names for my own vessel! I wonder if “Enterprise-D” is taken…
Within days of Starfield’s release we’re sure to see the community’s most creative players sharing their designs. Some will opt to recreate the likes of Firefly’s Serenity, the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, or any of the hero ships from the Star Trek franchise. There are bound to be some incredibly wacky designs in the mix, too. I love the way that Bethesda described this; spaceship design will err on the side of fun, not of realism. What that means in practise should be that players can get really creative without having to worry about the likes of aerodynamics or mass.
There will be limitations to this spaceship creator, and I’m trying not to go overboard with my hype! We haven’t seen, for example, the extent to which interiors of ships can be customised, and whether things like colours can be changed, furniture can be repositioned, and so on. I hope there will be at least some of that, so that we can truly make our spaceships feel like ours instead of like a collection of pre-made pieces.
But what I love about the spaceship creator is that the interior is fully-explorable. If you place a cargo hold next to a crew cabin, you can visit them – and the design of the ship will be reflected in-game. If you chose to make a really large ship, for example, with a long corridor connecting different rooms, you can actually walk down that corridor and see each of those rooms in the places you put them. In first-person or third-person!
When I was playing Star Trek: Starship Creator in the late 1990s, I’d have loved nothing more than to explore my weird Federation ship in first-person! This spaceship customisation feature is absolutely something that could be a fun game all by itself – and if it lives up to the hype and meets the expectations that Bethesda has set, I can see myself spending hours and hours customising every last detail of my spaceship before I actually get any questing done!
But maybe we should say “spaceships,” plural! Because in the showcase, Bethesda confirmed that it’s possible for players to have their very own fleet. We saw that at least nine ships can be owned at any one time, and all of them can be fully-customised. Only one ship can be the “home” ship, but I imagine which ship is the primary one is something that can be changed at will.
The showcase appeared to show a range of different spaceship parts, with different manufacturers having different styles and designs to choose from. We didn’t get a particularly long or in-depth look at all of these options, but we saw enough to at least know that there’s a decent range of potential pieces. The number of possible combinations of parts must be positively astronomical! It will almost certainly be possible to create spaceships with a huge range of believable and fantastical designs, and to fit very different aesthetic styles.
And we haven’t even talked about functionality yet! Some spaceships that were shown off at the showcase were small, designed perhaps for combat. Others were far larger, with massive cargo holds that can presumably carry a lot of resources – or smuggled goods. It’s possible to add or upgrade every component – such as engines, shields, and weapons. And these things are sure to have a noticeable impact on gameplay, with larger, heavier ships controlling differently from smaller, lighter craft.
I will be tinkering with all of these – adding different kinds of weapons in different combinations is something I’m particularly keen to experiment with. There were three types of spaceship weapon highlighted during the showcase: ballistic, laser, and missile. Again, what the limitations may be on how many weapons a single spaceship can have weren’t mentioned, but it looks like there will be appropriate options for different sizes of vessels.
Sticking with weapons, one area of gameplay that looked great in the Starfield showcase was first-person shooting. Past Bethesda titles – the Fallout games most notably – haven’t always excelled in this area. In Fallout, the VATS system (which paused gameplay to allow for targeting) covered up at least some of those games’ sub-par gunplay, but that won’t be the case in Starfield. Some rumours and reports had suggested that Doom developer (and fellow ZeniMax studio) id Software had been brought on board to help out.
Todd Howard, in a post-showcase interview, confirmed that Bethesda had worked with id Software, but seemed to suggest that they’d been helping more on the technical side with things like lighting and graphical fidelity. Either way, the influence of recent titles like Doom and Doom Eternal looked to be present in Starfield – at least looking in from the outside. It isn’t always possible to get a fair impression of something like gunplay from compressed video footage on YouTube, but from what we could see, gunplay in Starfield looks to be a vast improvement over past Bethesda titles.
That’s good news, because shooting and blasting your way across space is going to be a big part of the game! Whether you’re wrangling with pirates, getting into a shootout with western-inspired outlaws, or being pursued by aggressive fauna on an unexplored planet, guns are sure to come in handy! What we’ve seen of Starfield’s gunplay looked good – solid, I’d say. It’s probably never going to rise to the level of something you’d see in the likes of a Halo or Call of Duty game, because it’s only one part of a much broader experience. But solid, enjoyable gunplay is a must – and the signs are positive in that regard.
I was also pleased to see that Bethesda hasn’t abandoned the idea of melee weapons in Starfield. Bethesda’s melee combat has usually been pretty solid, at least by role-playing game standards, and it’s a hallmark of their games going all the way back to the first Elder Scrolls titles in the 1990s. Even though melee combat is sure to play a smaller role in Starfield – as the game promises lasers, electro-magnetic weapons, and a range of different guns – it’s not something I’d want to miss out on as it feels like it’s a core part of the Bethesda role-playing experience.
One criticism that I made of 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077 was that the player character’s backstory ultimately mattered very little in-game. Developer CD Projekt Red made a big deal in pre-release marketing material of the three different “life paths” available to players, but these amounted to little more than a short prologue and a single event midway through the game that we might generously call a “mission.” That was a disappointment and hampered Cyberpunk’s replayability.
In Starfield, there appear to be multiple character backgrounds, from action game staples like “bounty hunter” to less common ones like “chef!” The extent to which these will have an impact on gameplay, and the amount of content that may have been created for each possible background isn’t clear, but even if there are just a couple of missions and a few places where different dialogue options are available, it’ll still be fun – and better than Cyberpunk 2077.
Then there are “traits” – of which players can choose up to three. These are additional pieces of character creation that can be mixed and matched, with each giving an advantage and prospective disadvantage, too. Some look certain to unlock dialogue options and will have an impact on the way the player will engage with different factions and groups, and some even unlock entire characters. Again, this feels like something that has a tangible impact on gameplay, and could be a lot of fun to experiment with.
Past Bethesda titles offered players the opportunity to create a custom character class – rather than just being able to pick from staples like mage or warrior. Starfield’s complex system of backgrounds, traits, and skills looks like it could be something very similar, allowing players to either customise their character in detail or to go with a standard build suited to the likes of combat or stealth. I’m very much someone who likes to tinker and customise, and in my first playthrough in particular I expect I’ll spend ages agonising over which background to pick, then which traits to select, and so on!
Starfield also looks like it will offer a fair amount of diversity in its character creator. There were different skin tones, naturally, but also different hair types and hair styles, as well as tattoos, and Bethesda noted in the Starfield showcase that they worked with people from a range of different ethnic groups to ensure that there are a range of characters both as NPCs and as options for the character creator. That’s fantastic! Being able to represent oneself in a game like this is important – and I know a lot of folks like to spend a long time in the character creator recreating their own appearance.
There were also options for body type – including larger bodies that can sometimes be excluded in games like this. That’s also great! Most of the options in the character creator looked like they could be applied to any character – a male-bodied character could use a feminine walk style, for example. I didn’t see makeup options, but there were things like piercings, jewellery, scars, and the like. The player character isn’t fully-voiced, as far as I’m aware, so again I think there are options here for making a male, a female, a trans character, or even someone non-binary. I’m non-binary myself, so I appreciate feeling included!
Starfield has officially been delayed twice: from an initial November 2022 release to a nebulous “the first half of 2023,” and then again to September. Given Bethesda’s reputation for buggy games, and the difficult launch of Fallout 76 in particular, I absolutely see that as a positive thing. There’s a lot riding on Starfield for both Bethesda and Xbox, with the game being Bethesda’s first exclusive title since the Microsoft takeover. Getting it right – and ensuring the game is truly ready for launch – is incredibly important, and in an industry that seems all too happy to adopt a “release now, fix later” approach, I think it’s worth complimenting the approach that Microsoft and Bethesda claim to be taking.
In a recent interview, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty suggested that the reports he’d been receiving about Starfield were looking great – even making the audacious claim that the game would “already have the fewest bugs of any Bethesda game ever shipped” if it was released today. All of this is marketing speak, of course, but given the serious risk to the reputation of both Xbox and Bethesda if it turns out to be untrue… I think it’s positive, at least. Microsoft clearly recognises the issues that have been present, and on the surface at least it seems that they’ve given Bethesda more time to get Starfield ready. We’ll have to judge that for ourselves when the game arrives – and Starfield is, for me anyway, still in the “wait for the reviews” column – but these are positive noises nevertheless.
Characters are the heart of any good story, and Bethesda has created some fantastic and memorable characters for their games over the years. Off the top of my head I could pick out Fallout 3′s Three Dog, Yagrum Bagarn from Morrowind, and Alduin the dragon from Skyrim – and there are many, many more. After the disappointment of Fallout 76 with its empty world devoid of characters, it was wonderful to see so many different NPCs in the Starfield showcase.
The three major cities that we know of in Starfield look set to be large, dense, and full of people to engage with. And the diverse environments and factions should make many of these people feel unique. We’ve barely scratched the surface here, and there are bound to be hundreds or perhaps even thousands of individual characters to meet in Starfield.
One thing we know for certain is that Starfield is Bethesda’s biggest-ever game. And that includes recorded lines of dialogue: Starfield will have more than double the amount of dialogue that was recorded for Fallout 4. That game had approximately 700 NPCs, but also had a fully-voiced protagonist, something Starfield appears not to have. With so much dialogue having been recorded for the game, there’s bound to be a huge number of people to meet and engage with.
Some of these people can be recruited, joining the crew of your spaceship, being assigned to another spaceship, or being assigned to an outpost. Bethesda didn’t confirm how many recruitable NPCs there are in Starfield, but one thing I absolutely love is the idea of encountering some of these people at spaceports or just out in the wild. Bringing them on board, figuring out what skills and talents they have… it all adds to the immersion and the sense of truly being the captain of a spaceship in this open galaxy.
More than two decades ago, Morrowind was the game that I was looking forward to. I was incredibly hyped up for what was my first real open-world role-playing game. I’ve said a couple of times already that I don’t think any game since then has grabbed my attention in quite the same way, nor generated such a high level of interest and excitement – not until Starfield, that is. Ever since I first played Morrowind, I’ve ranked that game as one of my absolute favourite titles of all-time, and if Starfield is as good as Bethesda and Microsoft are promising, I can see it potentially joining Morrowind on that list.
Are there worries and points of concern? Absolutely. As I said, I wrote up all of my biggest fears for Starfield in an article here on the website just the other day. But at the same time, I still feel that sense of hope. This game, if it lives up to the hype, has the potential to be incredible. A friend of mine recently suggested to me that Starfield might end up being “the best video game that either of us will ever play,” and that assessment is hard to challenge. This game feels tailor-made for me.
So we’ve talked about some of the things I’m most excited about when it comes to Starfield! Stay tuned, because if we get any big updates about the game – or if I find that I have more to say – I’ll be sure to write about it here on the website. And when the game launches in September, I’ll do my best to share my first impressions and more!
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 and IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 