Starfield players will be able to explore over 1,000 worlds and moons. Source: Bethesda Game Studios
Starfield, the new game from Skyrim developers Bethesda Game Studios, was shown during a gameplay deep dive into the game overnight, in conjunction with the Xbox Games Showcase.
It’s the studio’s first new universe in over 25 years, promising over 1000 fully explorable worlds for players.
Development lead Todd Howard introduced the ambitious game.
“From the Elder Scrolls to Fallout, we love creating these worlds and playing in them just as much as you do — and throughout all that time we’d often talk about and dream up the ‘space game’,” said Howard.
“What if we could take that feeling of being who you want to be and exploring a new world, but set it in space. Where you weren’t really limited in where you could go, or what you could do. And that is Starfield.”
Starfield appears to be the studio’s biggest and most ambitious RPG to date — seemingly impossible for anyone to fully explore the whole game within a lifetime.
Combat ranges from melee combat and shootouts using customisable weapons against humans or alien wildlife, to space combat in dogfights against other ships.
Zero-G environments will even have an affect on combat, with ballistic weapons pushing the player back as it fires.
Or players can use speech checks to avoid combat altogether in some situations.
Bethesda stressed that it’s the player’s choice how they want to play, down to the number of sandwiches you want to steal.
Starfield features a variety of intrinsic character traits and five skill trees, with various skills such as the ability to use a jetpack or mind-control aliens.
A key concept to the development was the balance between fun and realism.
“We studied data from NASA and a multitude of other sources to help us make the world feel believable,” said one developer in the deep dive. “From the way we approached planetary atmospheres, to the way we placed biomes based on the planet’s distance from the sun.”
The deep dive covers many more of the game’s systems, including character creation, ship building, world and city exploration, galaxy simulation and more.
Starfield is scheduled for release on September 6, 2023 for Windows and Xbox Series X/S and will be available on Xbox Game Pass.
