Starfield

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.

Despite being announced before Microsoft bought Bethesda, and having a large window of 'nobody knows', the game is very steadfastly a PC and Xbox exclusive, and ...

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

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

Bethesda finally gave us a first look at its highly anticipated space-based action RPG Starfield at the Xbox and Bethesda Game Showcase, offering a taste of ...

That's a lot of ground to cover, and I'm worried a lot of that will be empty space. Still, we only got a slight look at Starfield's plentiful rocks and what we can do on them, so only time will tell if hours of exploration will be put to good use. Bethesda has clearly put a lot of time into development, seeing how it was even pushed back to 2023. As Howard shows as an example, you can in the city of Atlantis on planet Jemison, but also explore "anywhere on the planet." There's a lot to enjoy in the official gameplay reveal, and director Todd Howard gave us a hint of just how big the game is: ginormous. Over 1,000 planets, all open for you to explore," Howard says.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While we've seen multiple in-engine shots, we've never seem what the moment-to-moment experience of playing Starfield will be, until today's Xbox-Bethesda ...

The gameplay then showcased some of the shooter combat, with the player fighting off a group of pirates and swapping between first- and third-person gameplay. After opening on a gorgeous moon landscape, we looked at exploration of the world, including examining local creatures, mining for resources and invading a hostile base. Head of Xbox Phil Spencer promised the company would do better after the delay.

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.

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.

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.