Like other Bethesda Game Studios titles before it, Starfield is making grand promises with the level of freedom it will offer to players in how they want to play it and in the things that it will allow you to do. Given the sheer scope of the experience the space-faring RPG is touting, there’s no shortage of things that have caught our eye in what’s been shown of it so far, which, of course, means we’ve spent plenty of time daydreaming about specific things that we want to do in Starfield when we finally get our hands on it. Here, we’re going to talk about a few such things.
MESS ABOUT WITH THE CHARACTER CREATOR
A good character creator can be a massive timesink, and BGS games in particular have been known to deliver some excellent character creation toolsets. With Starfield, the studio is promising its most robust one yet, which, of course, means we’re going to spend an unhealthy amount of time playing around with all the options. Make sure we get our chin’s shape just right, look through all the hairstyles and see which one we like best, maybe give ourselves a cool scar across the eye.
EXPERIMENT WITH CHARACTER BACKGROUNDS
Character creation in Starfield will not be limited only to what you’ll look like, but will also let you select a background for your character that determines your backstory, and in turn, how that will affect your playthrough. Different dialogue options might become available, some questlines might get unlocked differently, the events in some storylines might get altered. We’re excited to see how that all works out, and just how much things will change based on what background you pick.
EXPERIMENT WITH TRAITS
In addition to a background, players will also be able to select Traits for their character, which will add wrinkles of their own to the experience. Like backgrounds, Traits will also alter the story and gameplay experience in their own ways, and based on what’s been shown of the game so far, there’s clearly going to be plenty of them available to pick from. Combined with backgrounds, Traits should ideally provide plenty of replay value, and we’re curious to see whether they can make good on their potential.
BUILD UP A FLEET
Starfield is going to be BGS’ first space game, and it looks like the studio wants to leverage that setting fully. Players won’t just have a ship in Starfield, but the ability to build up an entire fleet of them. From commandeering vessels through less than legal means to building your own spacecraft, Starfield will allow players to add new ships to their fleet in several ways, and we can’t wait to build up a sizeable collection of space-faring vessels.
MAKE A WEIRD SHIP
We imagine we won’t be alone in this in the slightest, but it goes without saying that our sizeable fleet of ships in Starfield is going to have at least one ship that was just made to test the limits of the ship building mechanics. Just how weird can you get with Starfield’s ship creation? What sort of shapes and sizes can your vessels take on? Can you make something that sort of looks like a Nintendo Switch? More importantly, what would that look like when it’s flying through the vast, dark expanses of outer space? We intend to find out.
LAND ON AN UNCHARTED PLANET
There’s going to be over a thousand planets to explore in Starfield’s Settled Systems, and obviously, only a deeply insane person would make it their objective to explore every last one of them. But we do very much intend to be the first person to set foot on a planet within the game’s lore. There will be plenty of planets in the game with no life or inhabitation, where no one has ever landed, and the idea of being the first one to land and walk on one of them is a thrilling one. Maybe we’ll even build an outpost- speaking of which…
CREATE AN ELABORATE OUTPOST
Outpost building in Fallout 4 and 76 could be pretty fun, thanks to how robust that creation toolset was, but it’s looking like Starfield is going to expand upon that in meaningful ways. Building a large, complex outpost with an elaborate design might be time-consuming, and staffing it up with a carefully selected crew and carefully decorating its interiors might take even longer, but it’s definitely something we can see ourselves investing a great deal of time in.
BECOME A SPACE PIRATE
If an open world game lets you commit crime, you’re going to commit crimes. And Starfield, like past BGS titles, is definitely going to let you commit crimes. Hell, there’s a whole faction of space pirates, and being a space pirate in a Bethesda RPG sounds awesome. Smuggling contraband, selling illegal cargo to make money, making shady deals, commandeering ships? Yeah, we want to do all of that. Oh, and speaking of commandeering ships…
BOARD AND STEEL A SHIP
Space combat is something that we’re probably going to be doing plenty of in Starfield as it is, and while we’re doing that, we’re definitely not going to pass up every opportunity we get to board a ship, steal it, and add it to our fleet. The mechanics of exactly how that will work and whether you’ll need special weapons or ship parts for that will obviously only become clearer when we’re actually playing the game, but that’s something we’re going to be on the lookout for.
DIVE INTO THE LORE
The lore and backstory are usually the best parts of any Bethesda Game Studios RPG, and we don’t expect that to change with Starfield. The Settled Systems are going to be a massive place, brimming with multiple planets and cities with their own unique histories and cultures, a multitude of factions with different backstories, conflicts, and motivations, and histories to learn about wars, interstellar politics, and more- and we can’t wait to dive into the nitty-gritties with all of that stuff.
GET INVOLVED WITH THE FACTIONS
Faction quests generally tend to be the meat and potatoes in most BGS games – maybe even more so than the main story itself – and it’s clear that faction questlines are going to be a crucial part of the experience in Starfield as well. Getting involved with the stories of the factions, learning about their histories, getting embroiled in their conflicts, and being able to shape their futures tends to be the highlight of most BGS titles, and hopefully, Starfield will continue that tradition.
OVERUSE THE JETPACK
With Starfield having no planetside vehicles to take control of, traversal when you’re not in your ship will revolve mostly around walking and using a jetpack- and boy, do we intend to use the hell out of that jetpack. Scaling heights that aren’t meant to be scaled, flying to the top of a mountain for no reason other than just enjoying the view, climbing to the roof of a skyscraper in a city- if the game affords the freedom to do that sort of stuff, it’s safe to say we’re going to do plenty of it.
SEE ALIEN FLORA AND FAUNA
With Starfield promising over a thousand players that can be explored, it seems safe to assume that there’s going to be plenty of variety not only in the sort of environments you’ll find yourself in, but also the flora and fauna you’ll see there. BGS has said that it’s spent a lot of time ensuring that the alien wildlife and plants you encounter on different planets feels authentic and imaginative at the same time, and we’re curious to see how successfully the game will strike that balance.
MISTREAT NPCs
Being awful to NPCs is a guilty pleasure most of us have in most games, but it feels particularly fun in BGS games, where the world is so emergent, and feels so reactive to what you do. Whether it’s a companion that you’re being unnecessarily mean to or a random NPC that you keep trying to pickpocket, BGS RPGs aren’t afraid to let you mistreat the people that inhabit their worlds, and that’s definitely something we’re looking forward to in Starfield as well.
EXPLOIT THE AI
AI in Bethesda RPGs always seems to teeter wildly between working as intended and doing the exact opposite, which is what makes it so fun to try and mess with it and push it past its limits. From exploiting the AI to cheese through stealth sections to figuring out what Starfield’s equivalent is of putting a bucket on an NPC’s head and then robbing them blind, we’re quite excited about the prospect of messing about with a BGS-developed AI system again.
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