Starfield

Following a delay to 2023, we finally get a real good look at the Skyrim dev's first new RPG series in 25 years.

There are now new rumors thanks to a Game Pass signup page spotted on Reddit suggesting “the first half” could mean “early 2023.” Whether these rumors hold any water remains to be seen, but according to GamesRadar, director Todd Howard said during a media briefing ahead of zombie E3 that the team is “putting the finishing touches on Starfield.” Set beyond the Solar System, you play as a customizable character who’s a member of a space-exploring organization called Constellation. The game can be played in either first- or third-person, similar to other Bethesda games including The Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76. After some preamble, Xbox boss Phil Spencer introduced a short Starfield sizzle reel before director Todd Howard took to the stage to show off the game in action.

The very first Starfield gameplay trailer is here, courtesy of today's Xbox/Bethesda showcase. Earlier today at the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase, ...

The date would've marked the second Bethesda RPG to launch on the day, after Skyrim originally launched on November 11 all the way back in 2011. Of course, this all follows hot on the heels of Starfield being delayed out of its original release date of November 11 later this year. Earlier today at the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase, the latter developer finally pulled back the curtain on the new RPG. The gameplay reveal for Starfield showed off space pirates, the mysterious moon of Kreet in May 2333, and what looks a lot like No Man's Sky's scanner.

Starfield is, naturally, set in space where players will take on the role of a last group of explorers. Described as “Skyrim in space,” by game director Todd ...

You can land and explore freely on all the planets in the system of Starfield, and Bethesda says there are more than 1,000 planets all open for players to explore. You can also build your own space ships, choose your crew members, and completely customize the look and layout of the ship. You can build your own outpost for resource generation across the planets, and you can hire characters you meet to keep them up and running. You meet them in the capital city of New Atlantis, where you’ll discover that this group of explorers is hunting for artifacts across the systems of Starfield. What are these artifacts being used for? You’ll pick three traits to customize for your character and the skill system will include unlocks and separate ranks. Powered by Bethesda’s new Creation Engine 2, the first Starfield gameplay shows a player freely roaming around in both first- and third-person views, collecting resources, and disturbing creatures that are also foraging on Starfield’s many planets.

Starfield dropped its most comprehensive trailer yet during the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase on Sunday. It includes a look at combat, character generation ...

“These decisions are hard on teams making the games & our fans,” Spencer wrote on social media at the time. The lengthy trailer, shown during a joint presentation with other Xbox Game Studios projects, and timed to coincide with the Summer Games Fest, also established the game’s storyline. In a presentation livestreamed on Sunday, game director Todd Howard lifted the cover off the highly anticipated game to reveal flyable, customizable starships as well as 100 star systems and more than 1,000 different worlds to explore.

I fell for this pitch once. It was 2005, and the game was Spore—SimCity creator Will Wright's ambitious recreation of life from microscopic organism up to ...

For a game about the breathtaking majesty of space exploration, Starfield has so far shown little that actually stirs the imagination. The worst is discovering that the answer, 99% of the time, is "another boring rock." "Spore promised us the Moon, and several years later, returned with some big boring rock," Rick Lane wrote in a retrospective a few years ago. It was 2005, and the game was Spore—SimCity creator Will Wright's ambitious recreation of life from microscopic organism up to the level of galactic traveler. And I guess in a sense it was: 17 years later, Bethesda's next big RPG is making the same mistake Spore did, hyping up mind-blowing scale as an awesome feature. I watched this entire 35-minute presentation (opens in new tab) enraptured, completely bowled over and convinced that Spore was the future of videogames.

The Monday letters page prepares to take out a mortgage on the new Elden Ring strategy guides, as one reader hopes for Gears Tactics 2.

I like the Gears franchise but wouldn’t say I love it, so didn’t know how much I’d enjoy Tactics but for me it’s the best game in the franchise. The Last Of Us Part 1 is a remake, that’s been rebuilt from the ground up – unlike Uncharted, which was a straightforward remaster. So I gave Gears Tactics a go and it was my favourite game of 2020. Plus, after a year the remake for The Last of Us Part 1 will be on sale on PSN, so it’s all good. GC: If you can name two good reasons to be against it that means you do understand the complaints? Like GC said, all the new stuff was good – like the ships and the exploration – but it almost made the game feel like a mod of Fallout, reskinning the stuff that already exists and then bolting the new stuff onto it. Even if you look at the price, no one is forced to buy it and everyone can happily play the PlayStation 4 version. I’ve got the 825GB SSD in my PlayStation 5 and by the end of the year I can have about two different games before it says memory full because of Call Of Duty updates. I hear commentators say that the game looks fine remastered on PlayStation 4, then by that conclusion the remake should not offend anyone. I didn’t think much of Redfall though and have no interest in racing games, so the number of Microsoft exclusives that interested me was fairly limited. Maybe the combat is good but it looked super generic, the way they showed it, and so did all the stuff with upgrading the skills and weapons. I think Microsoft put on a pretty good show on Sunday, considering they didn’t really have that much to talk about.

Starfield is the biggest Bethesda RPG yet, but is there enough room in the game for any multiplayer?

One of the best things about Bethesda RPGs is that they allow you to lose yourself in a world free of player-generated distractions, and it certainly seems like that’s what Starfield will try to offer when the game is released sometime next year. Finally, since Starfield is coming to PC, there is a very good chance that someone will inevitably create some kind of multiplayer mod for it. Of course, hearing that the game is that large made quite a few people wonder if Starfield will actually let you explore that massive universe with friends via some kind of multiplayer or co-op mode.

With a new trailer at the Xbox and Bethesda showcase, our first glimpse of gameplay in Starfield points at exciting potential.

And if you want to make a mark, building your own outpost can be a start. Engines, shields, and weapon systems matter when you are flying in space, and when things get heated, space combat is something players will have to master. Despite its delay to the first half of 2023, Starfield made an extensive appearance at the Microsoft X Bethesda showcase, showing off gameplay, story, and customisation options.

Bethesda Softworks, the game developer behind the Elder Scrolls Series and Fallout 4, has released the first-ever gameplay video for the company's new ...

Officially, Starfield is currently slated to be released at some point in 2023, with the game being delayed a year to give the developers enough time to deliver on the promises made by the game’s marketing. However, where No Man’s Sky is focused on procedurally generated space exploration, Starfield looks to be more in line with dungeon crawling, character-driven stories, weapon crafting, and realistic escapist immersion. In Starfield, Bethesda has taken what they have learned from all their previous titles, like Skyrim and the modern Fallout games, to build the company’s most ambitious game yet.

Sunday's Xbox showcase was light on news, but showed plenty of games due out in the next year – culminating in Bethesda's long-awaited space RPG Starfield.

But in the absence of any news about Fable, a new Elder Scrolls or other rumoured appearances, the star of the show was definitely Bethesda’s big new sci-fi franchise. Forza Horizon 5 is getting Hot Wheels-based new content on 19 July, and a 40th Anniversary edition of Flight Simulator will add helicopters and gliders as well as other aircraft. Starfield will also feature space exploration and space dogfighting, with players able to fully customise their craft with new weapons and shields, as well as recruiting their own crews.

Is Starfield on PS5 or PS4? Xbox and Bethesda are clear: no.

The opportunity is obviously long gone at this point, so if you want to play Starfield, Xbox and PC are your only options now. Todd Howard even talked about how limiting the platform would make a better game, stating, "you don’t ever want to leave people out, right? Minecraft didn't stop existing on anything when Mojang got bought by Microsoft. It's not a 'sorry you're never going to get to play anything on PlayStation again'". Many took that to suggest that Starfield might still have a chance on PlayStation. However Xbox marketing general manager Aaron Greenberg quickly shut that talk right down, stating that "Starfield will be launching exclusively on Xbox Series X

Yesterday, Xbox and Bethesda showed off actual Starfield gameplay for the first time, along with fresh information about how much larger the game was in ...

That’s fine, but that’s different from the potential Starfield offers with its large, but ultimately limited collection of planets and systems. Yes, it’s true that if you, a solo player, tries to explore every inch of all 1,000 planets to find something hidden and cool, you will probably die of old age before getting through a quarter of them. What this means is that yes, there will be vast regions of these planets that are autopopulated by No Man’s Sky-like mining outcroppings or wildlife, or in Starfield’s case, maybe randomized pirate outposts and things like that, who knows.

Starfield fans seem to have spotted our own solar system in Starfield, alongside real-life NASA projects – which means Earth may be explorable.

Fans will no doubt continue analysing and speculating about Starfield until it is finally released in 2023. Sent to Mars in 2003, Opportunity is considered one of NASA's most successful missions following 14 years of exploration, with a dust storm finally wiping it out in 2018. Starfield is set hundreds of years in the future, so Earth could feasibly be a markedly different place.

Last week Starfield could have been anything. But after last night's Xbox & Bethesda showcase, it became clear that Starfield is very much a Bethesda game—a ...

Starfield may be missing the absolute scale of a No Man's Sky or Elite, but the idea of nipping around in ugly, utilitarian starships (fully crewed and customizable) and setting up shop on a barren desert world is by far the thing that turned me all the way around. Starfield is still going to be a blockbuster tentpole RPG where choices don't really matter and your gun upgrades with a .5% crit perk. No Man's Sky is often gorgeous, but there are a whole load of stinkers in a universe of 18 quintillion planets. Hell yeah, I sure hope there isn't! I hope we get a thousand Mass Effect 1 Mako sandbox planets with nothing to do but vibe on. As soon as the world becomes a known quantity, my interest drops off fast as I'm left with only half-baked combat encounters and serviceable-at-best stories. The basic argument is that Starfield would be more interesting with 10 hand-crafted planets than 1,000 presumably proc-genned worlds.

Starfield's promise of 1000 planets suggests the game will have a lot of breadth, but no depth.

You hear of one player finding a certain NPC, or completing a particular quest in a specific way, and then you want to recreate that in your own game. If you think 1,000 planets is too much, the solution is to trim some down to make the others dense, not to have humans create the skeleton and then build an extremely expensive process to throw meat on the bone - different chunks of meat for each player, wowee! 1,000 planets is just far too many, and while I know they will be procedurally generated to an extent, that only addresses the technical challenges of making so many planets, not the tiresome act of playing the game. Starfield is the first fruit of this new tactic, and it looks exactly how I would expect Xbox's first show of strength to look: way too expensive, far too big, and incredibly generic in an attempt to appeal to the widest possible audience. While it currently seems to be winning over hearts and minds with the breadth and depth of Game Pass, Xbox has always relied on its heavy-hitters (most famously Halo) in order to keep it in the game. Valiant challengers, becoming more than the sum of their parts, staying afloat with a lot of good offerings but only mounting a serious challenge when one of the few greats in their roster comes out to play.

Bethesda's ambitious new role-playing game, Starfield, has revealed its official gameplay trailer, and wow! Fans have eagerly anticipated this epic sci-fi ...

In the new gameplay trailer, we see the player land on a planet, observe alien lifeforms, and mine some resources from the rocky walls. Players can even fly and fight in your ship from first- and third-person perspectives. As the game begins in the year 2330, the Starfield players are allied with Constellation, a group of explorers on a quest to find lost alien artefacts.

Get a headstart on creating your spacefarer by checking out our list of all the Starfield traits revealed so far, from alien DNA to managing a space ...

(Can’t be combined with any other faction allegiance trait.) (Can’t be combined with Extrovert.) Have you recently flown the nest, or are you an orphan settled on a distant moon? It also provided us with an early indicator of how Starfield’s traits can be combined (or not, in some cases), and the ways in which selecting them can impact gameplay. But 10% of all the money you earn is deducted automatically and sent to them. Alongside your character’s background and skills, Starfield traits offer a range of unique advantages and disadvantages, depending on which ones you pick.

Starfield's character creation menus are modelling themselves on some real-life science, namely molecular biology.

I’ve worked in labs and I’m married to a molecular biologist, so it did raise a smile on my face to notice this scientific touch during the Starfield gameplay footage. So the sliders in Starfield’s character creator screens are based on a technique called gel electrophoresis. Everyone knows that the true heart of any RPG is the character creation screen though.

Posted June 13, 2022, 8:06 p.m.. Starfield fans seem to have spotted our own solar system in Starfield, alongside real-life NASA projects – which means Earth ...

Sent to Mars in 2003, Opportunity is considered one of NASA's most successful missions following 14 years of exploration, with a dust storm finally wiping it out in 2018. Starfield is set hundreds of years in the future, so Earth could feasibly be a markedly different place. Reddit users are scanning every second of gameplay revealed during the Xbox Bethesda Game Showcase and believe they've found evidence that players will be able to visit Earth in the 24th century.

During the 2022 Xbox and Bethesda Showcase, Bethesda's Todd Howard finally revealed a substantial amount of new Starfield gameplay footage.

There are so many questions about this game that still need to be answered and so many valid concerns that still need to be addressed. That’s the thing about Starfield. I love what No Man’s Sky has become, but there are times when it still feels like a playable concept for another kind of game. Actually, if No Man’s Sky has been missing anything over the years it’s exactly what a BGS RPG typically offers: an epic narrative-driven RPG experience with tons of scripted content and gameplay-driven discoveries. First off, it’s been a long time since we’ve gotten a proper Bethesda RPG, and there aren’t exactly a lot of studios out there who have been willing and able to fill that void. In reality, fans know that means the game will likely feature a ton of bugs, uneven writing, and “spongey” combat. We still don’t know the game’s new release date (it’s coming to Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Game Pass in 2023), but our first real look at Starfield‘s gameplay at least answered a lot of questions about what kind of game it really is.

Following yesterday's big Starfield gameplay reveal, Bethesda has re-emerged with a few additional details regarding it…

Become a supporter of Eurogamer and you can view the site completely ad-free, as well as gaining exclusive access to articles, podcasts and conversations that will bring you closer to the team, the stories, and the games we all love. Bethesda, of course, shared a first proper look at Starfield during this weekend's Xbox Showcase, giving fans a taste of things to come when the delayed sci-fi RPG finally arrives in the first half of next year. Bethesda has apparently listened to feedback, however, and, at the very least, reverted to its tried-and-tested presentational formula of old.

Bethesda promising over 1000 worlds in its sci-fi RPG sounds like quantity over quality.

The size will either help Starfield feel like a generation-defining open-world RPG the way Skyrim was a decade ago, or a game that again demonstrates the folly of going big and adding more just because you can. “If you can recruit people from the 1,000 worlds, how many of those people are going to have fleshed-out stories? More often than not, the excess content feels like filler, or invites developers to crunch to get a game out the door, and sometimes both. And yet Starfield seems to be flirting with all of the same potential disappointments. Instead of mountains in the distance being climbable, this time it’s entire planets throughout the galaxy being visitable. Yet Howard decided to return to it while showing off the first gameplay for Starfield, Skyrim’s much-anticipated sci-fi successor, which has invited unkind comparisons to the disastrous 2016 launch of mega-sized space game No Man’s Sky.

Posted June 14, 2022, 1:43 a.m.. It will once again be left to players to imagine what their character sounds like in Starfield, with Bethesda confirming via a ...

Starfield continues to look like it will contain a huge world, and which is confirmed by the over 1,000 planets to explore. Players will not be limited to first-person throughout the game, as Starfield will also include a third-person camera. Historically, many of the protagonists in popular Bethesda developed games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 3 were silent.

One thing it didn't show was the game's main character speaking. Many players wondered if this meant that the player character would be Bethesda's usual silent ...

Many players wondered if this meant that the player character would be Bethesda’s usual silent protagonist, or if it might be more like Fallout 4’s voiced protagonist. Many fans didn’t like the changed to a voiced character in Fallout 4; it seems Bethesda Game Studios agrees. Starfield is set to come out in 2023.

Here are details about every Starfield background we've spotted so far, from bio entries to all of the starting skills you get when you begin your ...

They’re not the only way you can customise your character, though. Once you choose your Starfield background, there is no way to change it. The Colony War may have made implants and upgrades available to veterans, but you once saw a greater future. From Neon to New Atlantis, the megacorps stand as monuments to power, prestige and profit. Currently, there are 16 backgrounds that we know about, and five that we have details about. Some may act friendly towards you or be reassured that a mission will be successful because of your past, while others may be more hostile if they learn about the company you used to keep.

It might be more melee damage, extra health, carrying capacity and so on. It makes these choices more than just flavor to flesh out your Starfield role play - ...

There's also extra laser weapon damage which, if Starfield works anything like, Fallout, means that class of weapon damages mechanical enemies more. It suggests the pistol buff is there more for a last resort as you'll hopefully be sneaking and talking you way through problems instead. What's not clear at the moment is if these buffs are a starter boosts to thing you can later level up, or fixed value perks.

We finally got a good long look at Bethesda's space RPG Starfield over the weekend. The meaty, 15-minute Starfield gameplay trailer featured lots of details ...

And the nice thing about a silent protagonist is they can still speak inside my head (thanks to imagination) and they'll sound exactly how I want them to. When I'm immersed in a role, it can be jarring if I don't like my character's voice or even their inflection when all their lines have been recorded by an actor. The lack voice lines for our Starfield astronauts feels like a course correction from Fallout 4, which featured a fully voice player character, and this is sure to bring out some differing opinions among players.