Bethesda Announces Long-Awaited ‘Starfield’ With Teaser

At this year’s E3, Bethesda Game Studios, the developer behind The Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3 and 4, has announced their first new role-playing franchise in decades. Starfield, is the first new world that Bethesda has put together and will look to bring to life with their signature style of open world gameplay. The game is described as a “be what you want, go where you want” adventure, which sounds much in the same mold as Bethesda’s prior output, which focuses primarily on player freedom.

Designing a brand new franchise is always exciting for established, reputable developers, and many are excited to see just what Starfield will be. The game is set far into the future in the furthest reaches of outer space, with the player taking the role of one of the last remaining explorers searching for new worlds. The teaser doesn’t give much to go off of, but that along with a short “making of” video posted later offer some interesting concept for the world design of the game.

In terms of gameplay, I would be inclined to think that it would be similar in style to Bethesda’s flagship series, a first-person game with a massive world to roam around, plenty of quests, dungeons, and strong oddities along the way, with an emphasis on player-driven exploration, encouraging players to run round the world and see what happens, rather than gameplay driven by story or any sort of reward loop. Bethesda’s gameplay formula has led some to criticize the relatively thin stories and overall lack of focus compared to other games, however many players have enjoyed the aimlessness of The Elder Scrolls and the more recent Fallout games in spite of their shortcomings.

This will also be the first game developed by Bethesda as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, meaning that this game is an Xbox and PC exclusive and will likely remain that way, with little hope for a later release on Playstation or other consoles. This will bring an interesting new dynamic to Bethesda’s development cycle, as they have largely favored Microsoft devices over the history of their company. The other piece to this is that Bethesda’s games are notoriously buggy, each release coming with a laundry list of glitches that run from the comedic to the infuriating. Often times in the past, this bugginess was taken in hand with the size and scale of the games, and generally accepted as a necessary evil. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft cracks down on this and forces Bethesda to release a more polished product on day one, or if they are more lax about the whole thing.

In any event, Starfield looks to be an exciting new chapter for the Maryland-based company and many fans of their other franchises have reason to be excited for the game as the company releases more details over the coming months. Starfield is currently slated to be released on November 11, 2022. For more on this and other announcements from E3, stick to Under the Wheels.