Starfield has a release date

[Hatredsheart]

[Raid]

So that's September 6th and not June 9th, right?

[Hatredsheart]

So that's September 6th and not June 9th, right?

Indeed. Unless ofc it gets pushed back. Again.

[Sly Boots]

So it's coming out a week after BG3? Damn, going to be a struggle fitting both of those in

[Raid]

So it's coming out a week after BG3? Damn, going to be a struggle fitting both of those in

Good spot. I suspect Larian may be a little annoyed at this announcement. I know BG3 is hardly a niche title, but Starfield is probably the bigger release. I doubt I'll be terribly surprised if one of them is postponed. I'm certainly more excited for Baldur's Gate, but then I'll be getting Starfield for free via Gamepass anyway so it won't affect my purchasing.

[Sly Boots]

Damn, forgot it's coming to GP, result!

[Animalmother]

I assume the next 6 months will be spent finding all the bugs they won't be fixing.

[Sly Boots]

It just works, you guys.

[Raid]

That's true. We can play Baldurs Gate while they work out which are the worst bugs that need patching.

[Sly Boots]

[Sly Boots]

Microtransactions confirmed -_-

[Wrathbone]

I wouldn’t read too much into it yet. It came from the ESRB rating which mentioned “in-game purchases”, and if I remember correctly there are options in the main menus for Skyrim and Fallout 4 to buy the DLC. There are also featured community mods you can pay for in-game. Could simply be that.

Either that or it’ll be inundated with skins for your robot horse armour.

[Raid]

So here we are, a 45 minute deep dive.



It looks incredible, frankly, but I find that a little worrying. It can't possibly keep that level of detail up for the entire experience, I just don't think any game studio has the resources to make good on what they're promising. It's possible New Atlantis is the only city that looks like that, and everything else is a scattering of pre-fabs. They've confirmed that the game will insert hand-crafted content into the procedural generation, which is how I was hoping they'd do it, because procedural generation just isn't the selling point companies want us to think it is. I'd much rather they'd just made a single solar-system, given each planet multiple biomes, and then each world could feel like there's some character to it. What's the betting it's just full of "planet of hats" worlds, where every planet has one defining characteristic repeated across the entire surface?

Anyway, if you'd given this game to me as a teenager, I'd be ridiculously excited by all of the possibilities. In my late thirties though I'm just finding it a bit overwhelming sounding, to the point where I'm actually hesitant to get invested because a) I don't think half of it will work the way they sell it, and b) I'm just not going to have the time to put into this. I'll probably play for a few hours and then never touch it again, like I do with most big RPGs.

But hey, at least I won't have to pay for it.

[Wrathbone]

As with all Bethesda RPGs, it doesn't strike me as the sort of game where you realistically expect to see everything (or even most things) in one playthough. It's a game to be played and replayed over years, discovering new things each time. So in that sense I see it as a great big all-you-can-eat buffet to explore rather than an overwhelming 72oz steak to endure.

As I think I discussed months ago, the thousand planets thing doesn't really mean anything other than if you WANT to land on that barren rock over there then the game's not going to stop you. It's obviously just a number for marketing to throw around, but I expect the reality is going to be more like 10 fleshed out planets, numerous other planets with handcrafted encounters and hundreds of planets with procedural stuff in the event that you decide to land on one without a specific reason to do so. I don't see that as a problem at all, because inevitably the first thing people would complain about if you could only land on planets with a bunch of stuff to do is that you can't land on every planet. Bethesda probably expect most people to just ignore those sorts of planets, but want to offer something pretty to look at or some loot to get if players do wander there.

I think it's easy to hone in on the negatives and overlook all the good stuff with something as ambitious as this and, frankly, considering how janky and buggy as Bethesda games usually are. Bring on the jank, I say - it's never bothered me in Elder Scrolls and Fallout and I doubt it'll bother me with Starfield when I'm cruising around the galaxy in my personally-crafted ship smuggling illegal goods onto the swanky high-rollers space station they showed. I'm all in for this.

[Raid]

I think my post reads a lot more negatively than I meant it to. The 1000 planets thing is marketing rubbish and I guess I focused on it, but I think I mention it because it's the exception. I'm genuinely impressed by almost everything else they showed off today. It's not often I come across a game where I wonder just how in the hell they're doing all of this. I'm worried that the system specs for it will be monstrous unless you want it to look like Oblivion.

At the end of the day it's a Game Pass game, which automatically removes my biggest stumbling point when it comes to games like this; it doesn't matter if I don't think I'll get the most out of it because there's no price for entry. If I get a few hours of trying to build a ship that looks a bit like the Defiant, then I've gotten my money's worth.