It’s been a great week for Bethesda fans, as we now have two very important dates to mark on our calendars: First, June 11th, we’ve got a lot of promises starry sky focused direct (reportedly coming soon, but I guess we’ll have to wait until magic E3 as usual to see more).
Second, on September 6th, the game will actually – probably, hopefully – launch on PC, the Xbox family of consoles, which will be the first day of Game Pass, since Bethesda games are Microsoft’s first-party titles, now via A 2021 round of extreme capitalism. Actually, it looks pretty darn good.
Starfield is set in an era of massive space colonization, which is entirely new territory for the studio, and no one will mistake Skyrim’s Dragon’s Den tundra or Fallout’s shattered 50s America for Starfield’s NASA-centric, homemade interstellar Trek vibes, but it’s driven by the same principles that make Bethesda’s other games so appealing, as they once boasted proudly on the back of Oblivion’s box, allowing players to live another life in another world . Or the world, in this case.
Every aspect of life, from the mundane to the adventurous – from banking to piracy to alien archaeology is simulated in Starfield. If Bethesda pulls it off, and the almost full year delay is a promising sign of what they might be doing, Starfield may be the most complete vision of a “Life in Space” simulator ever released, fulfilling multiple previous games From Elite: Dangerous to No Man’s Sky, from X: Beyond the Frontier to Star Citizen, they’re all far behind.
If Starfield succeeds in this regard, it will be because of its heritage: Skyrim in Space may be thrown around as a pejorative in some circles, but I can’t imagine being anything but excited about the prospect . After all, Skyrim on Land is one of the most popular and successful games of all time, and for good reason: it’s awesome.
Of course, Starfield will be based on the work that made The Elder Scrolls so fascinating, but as we’ve seen from the latest footage (it was glimpsed in a previous reveal but brought to the fore in this week’s announcement video) and middle), it will also embrace dreaminess. Whether you call it magic or advanced alien technology, digging through impossibly ancient ruins to uncover the secrets of the Big Swirly Things is a key part of the Surviving the Elder Scrolls experience in Starfield, and it just gets better.