Can Starfield Live Up to the Hype?
We were finally treated to the official gameplay reveal for Starfield! A game initially teased during the Bethesda Game Studios E3 conference way back in 2018.
"It's like 'Skyrim' in space." With those words (and other grandiose claims) Executive Producer Todd Howard has set the bar for Starfield high into the stratosphere. After all, Skyrim is considered by many to be one of the greatest video games ever made.
Bethesda Games Studios is clearly focused on delivering another immersive game of grand scope to explore. The real question is, will everything come together to earn ‘Skyrim-level’ critical-acclaim.
We’ve seen games with lofty ambitions like No Man’s Sky & Cyberpunk 2077 crumble under the weight of impossible expectations, deceptive marketing, and/or rushing to release.
Will this time be different? Can Starfield live up to the hype?
Today, guest contributor & RPG enthusiast David Jones @ShogunOfTruth will help break down what we’ve seen so far. Of course, we are going see much more of the game prior to launch, but first impressions are important & could be a sign of what’s to come.
WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR…
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Starfield takes place around the year 2310, twenty years after the Colony War, during a time of uneasy peace between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective (two of the game’s main factions.)
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You’ll play as a member of Constellation, an organization of space explorers that Todd Howard describes as ‘“NASA meets Indiana Jones meets the League of Extraordinary Gentleman”
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When asked to expound on the main conflict of the game Todd Howard reiterated the focus would be on Constellation’s desire to explore the mysteries of the universe and the effort to locate ‘old Earth artifacts’ and discover their origin.
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Pete Hines offered an especially clear and bold proclamation the day after the gameplay reveal, saying “When we say ‘epic RPG’, we mean all of the stories- all of them.”
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Starfield will feature “over 300 actors and over 150,000 lines of dialogue“ that’s more than double the amount used for Skyrim. and it will feature a classic silent protagonist.
Antonio @HypeCaster
The main quest is never the highlight with Bethesda games. While the ‘organization of space explorers’ & ‘investigates mysterious artifacts’ setup seems tame at first glance, I’m sure they will use the sci-fi setting to the fullest & deliver some mind-bending side-missions. Fingers crossed for tales of time-travel!
My worry with Starfield in every area is the possibility of it becoming overly ambitious. Instead of attempting to fill a vast game-universe with a vast number of quests I’d rather they deliver fewer, more interesting stories.
I’ll miss having the player’s character be fully-voiced. Remaining silent throughout every interaction, no matter how consequential or intense break immersion. It’s a step backwards in my opinion.
David Jones @ShogunOfTruth
Starfield’s stories will likely fall into the same 3 categories as past BGS games.
The epic main quest that strings you through a large chunk of the game world. The personal, character & faction micro-stories you ‘stumble upon’ while exploring. And lastly, and by far the most important, is the story that you, the player, create for yourself.
Fallout 4 suffered a massive setback in this area by giving you a predefined background and goals from the very start of the game. Also, having a voiced protagonist limited your character’s dialogue. While still a fun game, it failed to provide the sense of power and personal agency BGS titles are known for. Thankfully, Starfield is returning to a protagonist defined by the player via character creation and dialog choices.
Trying to gauge the quality of story in a Bethesda Game Studios title is a complicated task. Hopefully, your personal choices and roleplaying will make for stories that are as revolutionary or recycled as your heart desires.
David Jones @ShogunOfTruth
‘Bethesda Jank’ has been known to put people off but the game looks better than I ever thought Bethesda’s Creation Engine could manage.
Facial animation is something Bethesda has typically struggled with. They’ve never looked on par with competing games.
I’ll never forget the first time I got into a first-person conversation with an NPC in Oblivion. Y'all have played it! You know it wasn’t a great experience. It's nice to finally see people look like, well… like people.
Bethesda showed a lot of interesting environments, but the bulk of the gameplay was set on the very gray, dead-looking moon of Kreet. Which is fine, I’d expect a moon to be bland. Some of the brief clips of other worlds took my breath away. It was a shame one of the more impressive locations wasn’t shown off.
For a game of this scope and size, Starfield looks amazing! As good as The Last of Us Part II? Heck no! And you really shouldn’t expect that from this type of game.
Antonio @HypeCaster
I’m very surprised they felt comfortable showing off Starfield’s combat in its current state. Was this putting their best foot forward?
Combat is never particularly deep or fun in BGS titles (aside from the Fallout series cinematic V.A.T.S. bullet-time targeting mechanic of course)
After this short first look I came away with a largely negative impression:
A.I. looked non-existent at times with enemies standing still, absorbing bullets with no reaction, and running into fire.
Projectiles (bullets, slugs, and shrapnel) are all telegraphed with simple white trails that looked awkward in motion. (I’m hoping lasers and other advanced weapons have an entirely different look in action.)
A grenade explosion is shown off with similarly lackluster particle effects & almost no environmental damage.
The weapon design, like the rest of the game, is very grounded and while the hardware we saw looks beautiful much of the weaponry shared the same box-like design and seemed to operate/shoot similarly.
Every item listed here is nit-picky, but these elements contribute to fun & engaging combat experiences in other games and RPGs.
To be fair, some of what was shown was impressive.
Weapons have wonderfully detailed textures
Some explosions result in impressive and hilarious effects
The low-gravity combat and jet-pack gameplay looks fun.
With the game being delayed there’s time for refinement. I’m hoping to see more combat abilities, offensive/defensive items & tech, interesting weapon types with alternate fire modes etc.
“We aren’t putting any limits on what you can or can’t do. We are just going to set you loose, sit back and watch the beauty that you create with your own stories and the way that you solve problems or choose to spend your time in this world we’ve created.”
Starfield will feature 4 major cities & "over 1,000 planets, all open for you to explore."
Todd Howard revealed that mainlining the game will take approximately 30-40 hours
There are “over 300 actors & over 150,000 lines of dialogue“, that’s more than double the amount used for Skyrim.
David Jones @ShogunOfTruth
This game looks massive. Bethesda has promised the main questline will be about 20% longer than any of their other titles. Add in space exploration, hundreds of planets, and this game is going to consume a lot of your life.
As expected, procedural generation will be used to create over 1,000 explorable planets. How will that affect the player experience? I’m concerned that many of these planets could be pretty empty, and that you’ll discover a lot of filler planets & never bother to land on them.
With a game this big, will BGS be able to spread out enough NPCs to fill it? I get the feeling that many planets may not have humanoid life that you can interact with at all. That’s a concern for those like me, who like to randomly stumble upon weird and interesting NPCs while exploring.
I’m okay with these things as long as other promises are kept like the freedom to explore some passive cities and a focus on player choice and deep character creation.
With a game this big, will Bethesda be able to create enough NPCs to fill it?
Antonio @HypeCaster
Spending hours in character creation, choosing a background & agonizing over which traits to choose. Researching which stats I should invest in to suit my pacifist play style. Examining every skill-tree, item description, and crafting menu- inject all of it into my veins!
Of everything we were shown in the gameplay reveal, the brief look at character creation did the best job to reassure me that Bethesda will deliver the depth & complexity min/max nerds like me crave.
Antonio @HypeCaster
In Starfield you will be able to pilot a starship & engage in ship-to-ship combat. What we saw of the space crafts interior and exterior looked intricate and beautiful. The huge revelation was that you’ll be able to construct a ship from a wide selection of components & choose crew members to populate it. I doubt the system will allow a Mass Effect level of depth, but it would be great if you could develop some type of relationship with a hand-picked colorful cast.
A strange design philosophy is at play in Starfield in that space & planet-based areas are considered separate ‘realities’. So we won’t be able to fly our ship from space down to a planet surface. The claim seems to be that the travel sequence would not really add anything worthwhile for the player, that this leg of the journey is filler- I couldn’t disagree more.
Moving from planet to planet seamlessly in No Man’s Sky was jaw dropping & solidified the massive sense of scale I feel is important in space exploration games. In the end I expect the true reasoning is that they really needed landing sequences to conceal load times.
David Jones @ShogunOfTruth
When Starfield hits shelves in 2023 (barring any more delays), it will have spent over 7 years in the oven. It would be an understatement to see there are high expectations.
I dislike Fallout 76. It was a bad idea, with even worse execution. I know Starfield has been the primary focus of the core team at Bethesda Game Studios, and that 76 was built by the newly absorbed Austin branch of BGS- still it's hard not to worry if Starfield could suffer the same fate. What if Starfield is in the hands of some of the same people responsible for 76 and it falls victim to bad decisions or bad execution.
Everything I’ve seen so far tells me that lessons were learned from Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. It looks like we are in store for an amazing open-world space RPG and a return to glory we have been waiting for since 2011’s Skyrim.
Of course, the gameplay reveal was a presentation of the game at its best. An optimal slice, designed to please fans. But soon we will experience the game for ourselves, and as we write our story, we may see the game at its worst.
What really awaits us? Choice and discovery, or bugs and frustration? Only the stars know.
If you’ve only watched the Starfield gameplay reveal in compressed/live-stream quality, be sure to watch it in stunning 4K.