Bethesda has unleashed another mini-salvo of teases for its upcoming open-world space RPG, Starfield. Director Todd Howard and others spoke a bit about how factions, companions, and other mechanics will work in a new roundtable video, and also showed eight whole seconds of what looks like actual Starfield gameplay, maybe.
Unless it gets delayed, Xbox console exclusive Starfield will be out November 11. That said, we still havenât really seen Bethesdaâs next game outside of last yearâs cinematic trailer and a bevy of concept art. Today, the dam finally broke and we got what looks like an in-game view of a very friendly robot named VASCO who will help players on their journey:
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1504102149155954694
It certainly looks like a Bethesda game!
Throughout the rest of the roundtable, Howard, design director Emil Pagliarulo, lead quest designer Will Shen, and lead artist Istvan Pely, broke down a bit more about what players can expect from Starfieldâs intra-galactic world:
Oblivionâs mini-game for persuading NPCs is coming back in some form
Four factions you can deal with: United Colonies, Freestar Collective, Ryujin Industries, and Crimson Fleet
Siding with the United Colonies space cops wonât stop you from also helping the Crimson Fleet pirates
Deeper character trait and background customization
More realistic looking NPCs
Weâll see how all of that pans out in practice. For those who donât remember, Oblivionâs persuasion mechanic revolved around a wheel of different choices like joking or coercion with some appealing to NPCs more than others based on their existing disposition. It was neat at the time, which was 15 years ago, but also easy to break and felt pretty manipulative. The current bar for branching dialogue, in my opinion at least, is Disco Elysium which offers a much more free-flowing and non-zero sum approach to conversation.
Iâm also skeptical of how the morality around some of these factions will play out. It feels like a lot of games (Fallout 76 included) havenât meaningfully progressed past what Fallout: New Vegas accomplished back in 2010. In the roundtable, Pagliarulo plays up the fact that a âgood personâ can still play with the âbad guysâ by narcing on the pirate faction to the United Colonies. That part of the conversation has already raised a few eyebrows, mine included. Hopefully the moral fabric of Starfieldâs in-game universe is less reductive.
