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Starfield: Everything We Know

December 20, 2021

In 2018, Bethesda shocked fans with the announcement of a new game that wasn’t part of an existing series. That was a huge move since Bethesda hadn’t released any new intellectual property in 25 years. The game was Starfield, and it’s the developer’s next big RPG, which is set in the final frontier of space, breaking away from dragons and magic. To help you keep up with what’s going on with Starfield, we’ve compiled everything we know about the game so far.

Platforms

Starfield is confirmed to release on Xbox Series X|S and PC. Game director Todd Howard said being able to focus exclusively on Xbox and PC is in the best interests of Starfield. However, he definitely hears and feels for PlayStation owners who won’t be able to play it.

“You don’t ever want to leave people out, right?” he said. “But at the end of the day, your ability to focus and say, this is the game I want to make, these are the platforms I want to make it on, and being able to really lean in on those is going to make for a better product.”

Some portion of the Bethesda fanbase continues to believe that Starfield could release on PlayStation, but that seems extremely unlikely given that Microsoft now owns Bethesda.

Release date

Starfield will be released on November 11, 2022. That’s a special day in Bethesda’s history, as the company released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on November 11, 2011.

Trailers

Back at E3 2018, Bethesda teased Starfield for the first time with a very brief trailer that gives only the barest sense of what it might be like.

The trailer shows the sun flaring over a planet before also revealing a space station with a very current-technology look. A second later, a rip in space appears that seems to suck everything in. It has the look of a bright Star Trek-like warp field, but it could be anything–a singularity, a wormhole, a space anomaly, or a cool special effect to end your trailer on. At this point, who knows.

After a long wait, Bethesda finally unveiled a new trailer for Starfield at E3 2021. It’s yet another short glimpse, but it further nails down the look and feel the game will have. The trailer follows an astronaut preparing to lift off from an alien planet. All the while, a monologue plays, discussing the endless frontier of space. Some fans believe that the trailer has an Elder Scrolls clue hidden in it.

Into the Starfield

In November, Bethesda kicked off a new video series for Starfield called Into the Starfield. In this series, game developers, including Todd Howard, will discuss the ambitious RPG and reveal new details about what fans can expect. In the debut episode, The Endless Pursuit, Howard, art director Matt Carofano, and studio director Angela Browder talked about how the studio’s ambition and passion have shaped the team and what they are hoping to achieve with Starfield.

Carofano said Starfield is more grounded and realistic than Skyrim, though at its heart the two projects share an ambition to give players the freedom to explore.

“It’s got a more realistic, science-based backing to it. Whereas Skyrim is sort of an epic fantasy, this is a more grounded game, and a grounded setting about exploration. So I think that gives us a different take on how we make everything,” Carofano said.

Howard said the mechanics of Starfield compared to Skyrim are “entirely different,” though there are some similarities. One of those is how Starfield is presented with a first-person camera (with a third-person option), and this helps make things seem more believable, he said.

“Being able to watch the sun set and nighttime come, and just sit there and watch the world go by, seems like it’s not gameplay. But it is vital to how you feel through the rest of it,” Howard said.

“There has to be an emotional trigger that occurs,” Browder added. “As time has gone on, I think we’re able to paint an even better picture that triggers that emotional thing.”

Also in the video, Howard teased that Starfield has two “step-out” moments, referencing the points in past Bethesda games where you leave the starter area and step out into the open world.

“Technology’s changed, we’ve all changed, so our expectations when loading up a game–like, ‘OK, I’m going to step out and there is going to be this moment’… Us being able to do that and have it feel new every generation, every game, is something that is really special about what we do,” he said. “I like to say that Starfield is two step-out moments–that’s cryptic.”

It’s an open-world, “more hardcore” RPG

While details are still scarce about Starfield, we do have a bit of a broad-strokes idea of what it’ll eventually become. Bethesda is known for its expansive open-world RPGs, like The Elder Scrolls series and the Fallout series, and Starfield will also exist in that wheelhouse. According to Howard, Starfield is more of a “hardcore RPG” than its previous work and will also be very big.

“It’s also a bit more hardcore of a role-playing game than we’ve done,” Howard said. “It’s got some really great character systems–choosing your background, things like that. We’re going back to some things that we used to do in games long ago that we felt have really let players express the character they want to be. So I think when you see it being played, you would recognise it as something we made.”

This all makes Starfield generally sound like what we’ve come to expect from Bethesda, but if there’s anything we can likely expect, it’s the variety Bethesda is known for implementing to make it a unique experience from its other work. While it delivers story and conversations in similar ways, The Elder Scrolls games are high fantasy titles that have you wielding melee weapons, bows, and magic, while the Fallout games are all about cool guns and VATS.

Fallout 4 added a whole lot more crafting and base-building to the formula, further differentiating it from, say, Skyrim. So there’s definitely latitude for Starfield to be pretty different from Bethesda’s other titles, even if it does have a lot of the same open-world RPG elements, like branching stories and massive worlds to explore.

Bethesda’s engine got an overhaul for Starfield

In September 2020, Bethesda released a statement about how much the acquisition by Microsoft and the release of its new Xbox Series X and S were impacting the work the studio was doing on its games. In that statement, Howard said the new technology had led to “our largest engine overhaul since Oblivion.”

“With each new console cycle, we evolved together. From bringing mods to consoles with Fallout 4, now over a billion downloads, to the latest technologies fueling Xbox Series X/S,” Howard said. “These new systems are optimized for the vast worlds we love to create, with generational leaps not just in graphics, but CPU and data streaming as well. It’s led to our largest engine overhaul since Oblivion, with all new technologies powering our first new IP in 25 years, Starfield, as well as The Elder Scrolls VI.”

For years now, Bethesda has powered its games with its Creation engine, which is the technology behind The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, as mentioned, as well as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76. So this makes it pretty clear that Starfield also uses the Creation engine–albeit an overhauled version that takes into account a whole lot of new technology and hardware capabilities.

Pick your own pronouns

Bethesda’s games are known for giving players the freedom to create and customize their characters, and this tradition is carrying forward and being modernized with Starfield.

Todd Howard confirmed during a Reddit AMA that players will be able to select their own pronouns–he, she, and they–and all relevant dialogue has been recorded to support whatever choice players make. Players will also be able to customize their character’s background, skills, and other elements that define their setup.

Starfield will be on Xbox Game Pass

This is a bit of an obvious one, but it bears repeating. With Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda, the publisher announced that new Bethesda games would appear on Xbox Game Pass at release–and that includes Starfield. So you’ll have instant access to it on PC and Xbox Series X|S.