Bethesda's Starfield First Gameplay Reveal Video

[Vinyadan]

As the title says, the gameplay reveal video is out.

[MCerberus]

It convinced me to give it a look when it launches, because it's going to be on game pass. Don't believe Todd's lies.

[Lord Raziere]

so what I'm getting here is.... No Man's sky with better guns and the plot of Mass Effect 1: find the ancient alien artifact psychic thingies while exploring like an astronaut and building ships and bases.

sounds about right for Bethesda. not sure how I feel about it yet.

[Rynjin]

No Man's Skyrim looking pretty fun, though the 1000+ planets thing makes me feel like there will be way too much filler.

[Anteros]

Looks like a cross between NMS and Space Fallout. I see the enemy AI is still completely brain dead.

It looks....fine. Nothing to get excited about, but I'm not angry it exists or anything. I hoped for more out of a supposed decade's worth of work, but I didn't expect it.

[Lord Raziere]

It looks....fine. Nothing to get excited about, but I'm not angry it exists or anything. I hoped for more out of a supposed decade's worth of work, but I didn't expect it.

Yeah, thats kind of the problem, its thoroughly whelming judging from this trailer. sure it doesn't look bad, but I don't think "you can build your own ship" is the mind-blowing homerun pitch that Todd thinks it is, considering what people have experienced now. its more of a "huh, they finally got around how to figure out 3D building with mobile ships thats cool I guess". and everything else is just kind of known capabilities. even if we assume no bugs (heh!) its kinda looking middle of the road. little generic space astronaut in its gritty verisimilitude look, so without anything mechanically fantastic, and without any real personality or evocative atmosphere beyond "gritty grey space travel" its just kinda there and being lukewarm when it needed to make fireworks happen.

[Corvus]

Looks fairly Bethesda. So it'll be filled with bugs and jank and will be best played with fan mods and patches. But still worth playing.

[Spore]

The space parts look very promising, but holy heck does the shooter bit look generic as ****. It is pretty (which makes me worry my PC cannot handle it anyhow), but another generic shooter with rpg elements? No, thanks.

With this being an original IP, from Bethesda and a "new" game concept, the resulting game needs to be exceptionally good. Oh and it should be relatively bug-free, if they want to limit mod support or have the game be DoA.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

So to recap:

* FO4's perk system, slightly cleaned up
* FO4's settlement system
* FO4's weapon mod system
* Space Pirates for Raiders, which either you or at least some named NPC can/has join/ed.
* NMS's procedural generation system
* What appear to be functionally FO4's weapons, with a cool reskin
* A robot of some kind as a companion, which will probably just sit there and watch you get mauled, because heaven forbid a companion is actually useful in a Bethesda game
* Still made by Bethesda, so plenty of bugs, glitches, CTD errors, and general instability we've come to expect from them.

It might be worth looking at a year or so after launch when the worst of the bugs have been patched out and there's enough community support to fix all the stuff Bethesda didn't care to. Assuming of course that it's running like FO4. If it is using F76's 'always online' approach, then it's just DOA. By that point there will likely have been a couple of DLC's released to provide power creep and make stuff from the base game obsolete to justify its purchase.

[Dire_Flumph]

It looks interesting, and I'm eager to play it, but Bethesda is just so hit or miss. I can travel through Morrowind or Skyrim more than a decade after release. But after short runs through Oblivion and Fallout 4 (or No Man's Sky for that matter, which I was really getting vibes for watching this) I've never felt compelled to return.

Could be great, could be a boring mess. Just hard to say until I've spent some time with it. I'll give it a solid shot next year.

Edit: Is anyone still impressed by claims of raw space in game worlds any more? Saying things like "over 1000 planets" really just confirms it's mostly procedural generation which rarely produces anything a fraction as interesting as something hand built.

[Anteros]

I'm just waiting for one of the planets to just be Skyrim's map.

Anyway, the bright side about huge procedurally generated games like this is that it gives modders plenty of room to work. Bethesda games usually have a thriving mod community, so I'll be interested to see what those look like in 5 years or so. There's probably more to be excited about there than the base game.

[Eldan]

so what I'm getting here is.... No Man's sky with better guns and the plot of Mass Effect 1: find the ancient alien artifact psychic thingies while exploring like an astronaut and building ships and bases.

sounds about right for Bethesda. not sure how I feel about it yet.

Yeah, my brother and I called it "the main character from No Man's Sky in the setting of The Outer Worlds, finding the artefact from Mass Effect 1 to assemble a Star Gate".

That, plus some utterly uninspired looking shooter gameplay. Space pirates in an abandoned station, on a deserted moon with barely any life or geography. Yaaaawn. Also, stupid AI, with unarmed enemies running into machine gun fire.

I don't even see any interesting powers or weapons, so there's nothing that makes me want to play this.

(And I actually like No Man's Sky.)

It makes me think of the Morbius memes, actually.

Starfield will be one of the games of all time.

More genreally, I think this is a first for me: I didn't see a single game in the previews this year I'm really excited about. Am I just old and cynical?

[Lord Raziere]

Yeah, my brother and I called it "the main character from No Man's Sky in the setting of The Outer Worlds, finding the artefact from Mass Effect 1 to assemble a Star Gate".

That, plus some utterly uninspired looking shooter gameplay. Space pirates in an abandoned station, on a deserted moon with barely any life or geography. Yaaaawn. Also, stupid AI, with unarmed enemies running into machine gun fire.

I don't even see any interesting powers or weapons, so there's nothing that makes me want to play this.

(And I actually like No Man's Sky.)

I mean.....thats kind giving too little credit to the setting of Outer Worlds in my opinion, because Outer Worlds has personality. Outer Worlds is pulp sci-fi tech meets corporate cyberpunk blended into a dark comedy about a society ruled by megacorps trying to colonize other planets and doing it badly. Starfield is just the protagonist of No Man's Sky in less infinite No Man's sky, its just bland, there is no sense of style or decoration, no sense of flavor, no life beyond these utilitarian blocky buildings and uninspired environments little different from anywhere on earth. Fallout worked because it allowed itself to be wacky and ignored realism for the sake of people walking around in 1950's dresses or old costumes while people talk in variety of ways and whatnot. Mass Effect worked because the setting felt lived in, connected, had emotion and complex political problems that felt like they could really happen.

this? this is just "oh lets take the general idea of space and astronauts and slap Halo artifacts in there". as far as space opera goes, thats barely a setting, that is an outline someone jots down with a lot of blank spaces to fill in. like the best they could come up with in terms of enemies is just....raiders. a thousand planets and the humans in it, scattered across vast differences with unlimited potential for political divide....and they decide to go with generic space pirates to show off. yawn indeed.

like sure I might look forward to the mods that actually add in something interesting, but thats gonna be a while, not something to hold my breath for.

[Eldan]

Fair enough. I didn't play Outer Worlds long enough, maybe, but I remember plenty of rather uninspired abandoned bases. The settlements, factories and so on were cool and had some personality, but they didn't really grab me either.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I’m mostly happy to see this game coming out because it means Elder Scrolls 6 is next.

Faction names seem a bit uninspired? “Constellation” for space explorers? “Crimson Fleet” for pirates?

[Triaxx]

I'm pretty excited even if it's not getting a pre-order from me. It's got all the stuff I like. Customizable Ships, Customizable bases. Customizable weapons. (Even if the 'extended mag' looked like a cordless drill battery) a choice of factions I'll almost certainly ignore after the first completion. Looks solidly Bethesda and I like that.

[Dire_Flumph]

Fair enough. I didn't play Outer Worlds long enough, maybe, but I remember plenty of rather uninspired abandoned bases. The settlements, factories and so on were cool and had some personality, but they didn't really grab me either.

I played it to the end and this was my exact take.

[warty goblin]

I guess you could say Outer Worlds had personality, but that personality was mostly just annoying in a kind of bland way. Iy didn't really have much to say, but boy was it going to say it in the longest and most ha-ha whacky way possible. Also all the guns were kinda old-westy for, I guess, flavor reasons. Specifically Extract of Firefly flavor, it tastes just like overused cardboard!! I got through the first planet, and it was fine, but the idea of several tens of more hours of overly zany trailer style "humor" was extremely unpalatable, and it hit the inevitable problem of all the open world with guns RPGs, namely open world shooters exist and do the primary game element (shooting) better.


Starfield looks fine. If you asked people to describe a space RPG made by Bethesda, I'm pretty sure 98% would come up with basically this; i.e. Fallout In Space, i.e. Oblivion In Space With Guns. Which is also probably what most people who are at all interested in this more or less want, so that's good.

I actually kinda like the aesthetic though. It has a nice lo-fi vaguely hard SF appearance that I dig more than whacky! though without the drowning vastness of No Man's Sky.

[Vinyadan]

I actually kinda like the aesthetic though. It has a nice lo-fi vaguely hard SF appearance that I dig more than whacky! though without the drowning vastness of No Man's Sky.

Personally, I was surprised by how many flaviours of sci-fi they crammed into it: a Martian rover, a cyberpunkesque neon city, that New Atlantis city, Prey-like gravity-free combat, Starship Trooper and Colonial Marines, wide sceneries ready for exploitation that look like Supreme Commander maps, some planet exploration that reminded me of the planet part in Isolation, Rebel Galaxy's ship combat and customisation in a huge, multi-system universe...

At the same time, yes, the combat looks uninteresting, but Bethesda RPGs never have had interesting combat* (although javelin headshots were fun in New Vegas).

My only question is whether the setting can be as interesting as Morrowind, which is what I have really wanted from Bethesda all along (probably unfairly, because Morrowind definitely stands out among the five single player Elder Scrolls games).

*shoutout to Morroblivion, which created a monster by mixing Morrowind's spells with the extremely fast and fluid casting of Oblivion, coupled with Fatigue regeneration. Both levitation and paralysis use the physics system, and being hit by paralysis means falling from mid-air and bouncing back up. Everyone runs like hell. Pillar dancing is actually difficult and fun. Spell projectiles travel fast. Maybe it's just my unarmoured archer build, but ES combat has never felt so good and so challenging while actually giving you a chance to win.

[InvisibleBison]

I really hope that robot isn't as much of a narrator as that initial segment makes it seem to be. The moment where it tells you that the pirate ship you just scanned means that there are pirates nearby seems particularly unnecessary.

The new lockpicking system seems to be quite dumb. As far as I can tell, it consists of matching the shape of the lock to the shape of your lockpick, which is to say that there's no actual gameplay here. You'll either have the right lockpicks, in which case lockpicking is busywork, or you won't and you can't pick the lock. I may well be missing something, and I really hope I am, because if not this is literally worse than nothing.

Does anyone else think New Atlantis seems vaguely authoritarian-dystopia-ish? We only see it for a few seconds, but there's government insignia splashed over everything and groups of heavily armed soldiers patrolling and standing guard in what appear to be public places.

I'm deeply unimpressed by this talk of a thousand worlds to explore. The only way they could get that many worlds is through procedural generation, which means that there's nothing to see after you've seen a bit of each biome. And while there is definitely going to be occasional bits of hand-crafted content, there's no way we can be expected to actually find it amidst the vast quantity of dross, so there's going to be something pointing us to each handmade section, which completely undermines Howard's bit at the end about exploration and discovery.

All that being said, the trailer is making me interested in the game. I liked Skyrim and Fallout 4, so if this game is as similar to those as it seems to be I'll probably like it too.

[Aeson]

The new lockpicking system seems to be quite dumb. As far as I can tell, it consists of matching the shape of the lock to the shape of your lockpick, which is to say that there's no actual gameplay here. You'll either have the right lockpicks, in which case lockpicking is busywork, or you won't and you can't pick the lock. I may well be missing something, and I really hope I am, because if not this is literally worse than nothing.

Funny, that reads like my opinion of every lockpicking minigame in pretty much every game I've ever played - they're largely-uninteresting wastes of time that usually don't interact with anything else going on.

Morrowind's "click on locked object repeatedly until you roll high enough" lockpicking system might not be particularly interesting, but then neither are any of the lockpicking minigames that Bethesda (or, for that matter, pretty much any other company I can think of that included one in any game I can recall playing) has come up with, and at least in Morrowind the world doesn't freeze while you're doing it so being good at it and picking the right moment to try it mattered a bit beyond just the risk of running out of lockpicks and patience.

[Vinyadan]

Does anyone else think New Atlantis seems vaguely authoritarian-dystopia-ish? We only see it for a few seconds, but there's government insignia splashed over everything and groups of heavily armed soldiers patrolling and standing guard in what appear to be public places.

Yes, it actually reminded me of Buenos Aires in Starship Troopers.

Funny, that reads like my opinion of every lockpicking minigame in pretty much every game I've ever played - they're largely-uninteresting wastes of time that usually don't interact with anything else going on.

If I think of a game that did well with lockpicking, I end up thinking of Deus Ex, which had no minigame and instead had you choose your skill progression and the contents of your inventory, so that lockpicking was one of many ways you could get through an obstacle.

[veti]

Funny, that reads like my opinion of every lockpicking minigame in pretty much every game I've ever played - they're largely-uninteresting wastes of time that usually don't interact with anything else going on.

My favourite lock picking minigame is in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The world doesn't freeze, and the twist is that breaking a lockpick makes a loud noise, pretty much guaranteed to attract the attention of anyone within about twenty metres.

The problem is, as with most of that game, that it's more a test of player skill than character skill.

[Anteros]

My favourite lock picking minigame is in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The world doesn't freeze, and the twist is that breaking a lockpick makes a loud noise, pretty much guaranteed to attract the attention of anyone within about twenty metres.

The problem is, as with most of that game, that it's more a test of player skill than character skill.

Seems kinda dumb though since breaking a lockpick in real life is almost noiseless.

[veti]

Seems kinda dumb though since breaking a lockpick in real life is almost noiseless.

Possibly the lockpicks you're familiar with are not the same as 13th century ones.

[warty goblin]

So watching the trailer again, I feel I was maybe overly negative. Looked at another way, its like they're making the game the original Mass Effect (and by extension Andromeda) always kinda wanted to be. Some big silly space magic plot, lots of exploration and side quests, and a sense of a big, lived in galaxy.

Now to be fair, ME had a decent plot and told it well. Since Bethesda couldn't write their way out of a damp sandwich bag, I doubt Starfield will have a good story. But Bethesda is pretty good at making exploration and side quests fun (not complex, fun), and when they put in a bit more effort than "corpse next to treasure map" do pretty well at environmental storytelling and making a place at least look lived in. So I expect those parts of the game to be pretty strong.

Plus they actually put space flight and space combat in their space game, which is something I'm actually pretty excited about. Im not expecting a top of the line space shooter, but I don't think it needs to be because it isn't carrying the whole game. It just needs to be pretty good and pretty fun to be worth having. If nothing else, it simply being in the game opens up the mission possibilities enormously. Again, I'm not holding out hope for anything really complex, but just having to actually beat the bad guy fighter swarm so you can land on the space station and shoot them with your space AK is a hell of an upgrade over not being able to do that.

The problem is, as with most of that game, that it's more a test of player skill than character skill.

I'd say player skill should be more important than character skill in a first person action game. The whole point of a first person action game is the sense of being there and doing the thing, which illusion is usually not improved by having a big enough number to just make problems go away.

(And really the dichotomy is false anyway, all character skill systems do is turn a player skill/reflex test into a test of whether the player has a big enough number because they built their character right. Which at some level is just a "did the player read the subreddit?" check. )

[The Glyphstone]

If I think of a game that did well with lockpicking, I end up thinking of Deus Ex, which had no minigame and instead had you choose your skill progression and the contents of your inventory, so that lockpicking was one of many ways you could get through an obstacle.

If we're allowed to interpret 'lockpicking' a bit flexibly, I enjoyed the hacking minigames in the new-gen Deus Ex games quite a bit. Having some sort of active opposition made it feel more interactive somehow.

[Rodin]

So to recap:

* FO4's perk system, slightly cleaned up
* FO4's settlement system
* FO4's weapon mod system
* Space Pirates for Raiders, which either you or at least some named NPC can/has join/ed.
* NMS's procedural generation system
* What appear to be functionally FO4's weapons, with a cool reskin
* A robot of some kind as a companion, which will probably just sit there and watch you get mauled, because heaven forbid a companion is actually useful in a Bethesda game
* Still made by Bethesda, so plenty of bugs, glitches, CTD errors, and general instability we've come to expect from them.

It might be worth looking at a year or so after launch when the worst of the bugs have been patched out and there's enough community support to fix all the stuff Bethesda didn't care to. Assuming of course that it's running like FO4. If it is using F76's 'always online' approach, then it's just DOA. By that point there will likely have been a couple of DLC's released to provide power creep and make stuff from the base game obsolete to justify its purchase.

My dream would be for them to focus all this crap that I don't like into Starfield and make that their IP for the type of gamer they've been pursuing since Fallout 4 - the loot'n'shoot with Minecraft crowd.

Further dream would be for them to have spent the "over a decade" since Skyrim designing a totally new engine and building out a new game from the ground up with a bigger focus on story and refining the gameplay. In short, listen to the critics and address the flaws instead of pursuing the lowest common denominator.

Sadly, I suspect that what we're going to get is an Elder Scrolls game with no story and the ability to build your own castle. Running on yet another version of the Gamebyro engine, with the in-game clutter still using the models originally created for Oblivion.

[Anteros]

Possibly the lockpicks you're familiar with are not the same as 13th century ones.

Considering that 13th century "lockpicks" were basically just various shaped keys I very much doubt they contained an alarm for failed attempts, although I'll grant that anyone incompetent enough to break off a giant iron key inside of a door is probably making noise.

Locks at the time were nothing like our modern conception and the pin and tumbler system wasn't invented for another 500 years or so. This is where the idea of skeleton keys come from. They were actually a real key that was either forged to work in the most common locks, or able to change its shape in a limited manner. Locks themselves were far more rare than games would lead you to believe as well.

In the game itself you're just inserting a pin into the lock to hold the tumbler in place while twisting the lock with a knife. There's no compelling reason it should make a loud noise on a failed attempt unless your character is intentionally doing so. For a game that touts "realism" as one of the main draws, it's still incredibly unrealistic in a lot of ways. Understandably so since reality doesn't make for a great game.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Okay having watched the trailer again:

I really hope they either remove, or have the option to turn off the constant 25 XP 3 XP 18 XP spam every time you hit something. Talk about immersion breaking!