There's a whole universe to explore in Starfield, quite literally, in fact. But it looks like a good chunk of the game's player base has yet to leave terra firma.
30.08.2023 - 10:31 / gameranx.com / Todd Howard / Starfield Players / Space
Bethesda brought a few content creators over to the US Space and Rocket Center for a unique experience. To prepare for Starfield, they got to play in a real life space camp.
Tiktokers Astro Alexandra and Filip Zieba, and YouTubers Myth and LilyPichu, were all brought to Huntsville, Alabama, to see some of the artifacts of NASA’s own space exploration, as well as get a real life feel of what it would be like to really imagine yourself going out into space.
The US Space and Rocket Center is essentially the NASA Museum that is open to the public. It does also offer the US Space Camp, an educational camp that gives anyone the chance to experience what it would be like to be an astronaut. The camp these content creators got to experience was basically the short tour, to relate to some things that they can also experience in Starfield.
For their first Space Camp experience, the content creators were placed in the 1/6th chair. This isn’t exactly like a chair for sitting, as it’s a contraption that allows the rocket center to simulate the gravity of the moon, and other planets. They practiced different jumps with different gravities, to simulate using the Starfield boost packs to get around planets.
Their second experience, was, well, an actual honest to goodness simulation of what you would do in the International Space Station. The content creators were tasked with repairing the ammonia tank assembly, referred to by the technical name of EVA, or extravehicular assembly. All that means is any work done outside a spacecraft. The name of this task was teamwork, which is also something you’ll need with your NPC teammates in Starfield. I suppose it’s actually kind of a boring task, unless you’ve seen the Sandra Bullock film Gravity.
The final task takes them on the multi-axis trainer, which is probably one of the most well known and iconic astronaut training equipment. As seen in many music videos, documentaries, and movies, this is the device that you get strapped onto while it spins you around. This experience simulates the feeling of losing control of a spaceship. We don’t know if Bethesda fully simulated that feeling, but we’re happy to report nobody who took this challenge lost their lunch doing so.
This goes without saying, but when Bethesda set this up, it wasn’t some hypothetical out of touch scenario. Todd Howard himself personally toured the same US Space and Rocket Center, as well as the nearby Marshall Space Flight Center, and even visited SpaceX, in the course of Bethesda’s research for Starfield. There’s no doubt many Bethesda employees experienced what they also did to make their game.
You’ll probably enjoy watching these content creators relate what they experienced to what it will be like when
There's a whole universe to explore in Starfield, quite literally, in fact. But it looks like a good chunk of the game's player base has yet to leave terra firma.
Despite Starfield's popularity, roughly a quarter of Xbox players have yet to actually launch themselves into the game's titular field of stars.
There’s a difference between having an “expansive title” that you can do a lot in and a “meaningful title” where your choices affect everything around you. Those who make open-world RPGs must see how well they can balance those elements to deliver something special for players. Regarding Bethesda’s latest title, Starfield, fans are a bit mixed on where the title falls within those categories. On the one hand, there is a massive universe to explore, and you have the freedom to do certain things, but how the game “reacts” to certain things has caused some players grief.
The Starfield community's ships are giving me some heavy Spore flashbacks. In case that's a game you missed, 2008's Spore was a funky little space-sim with several minigames stacked onto its back-end.
Over the weekend, Starfield players began to share reports of a strange paranormal infestation. There are asteroids in the game that, for reasons known only to gods and/or programmers, follow you from orbit to orbit, flying eerily in formation with your ship, and sometimes even accompanying you to a planet's surface. "In one of my weirdest Bethesda glitch experiences, I've got a tiny asteroid that's been following me for the past 30 hours," user ReverendRoo posted on Reddit, triggering an avalanche of comments reminiscent of UFO chasers spotting each other at a NASA open day. "I would catch a glimpse of it from time to time," wrote fattfett. "I tried to approach it but you can't. It stays away. I assumed it had a deeper meaning [toward] the endgame." Some players, like Blackdius, have multiple asteroids in tow. It seems impossible to blow them up. I've dug up a Youtube video below of one such clingy space boulder from a couple of weeks back. As you can see, it's not just a fixed background point like a screen artefact, but seems to move in response to the player's ship. Most peculiar.
With around 1000 explorable planets on offer, Starfield is positively bursting with new environments to explore. But some players think they’ve discovered something more familiar: an homage to a classic Halo planet. Kinda.
Starfield guide: Our hub of adviceStarfield console commands: Every cheat you needStarfield mods: Space is your sandboxStarfield traits: The full list, with our top picksStarfield companions: All your recruitable crewStarfield romance options: Space dating
Many of us remember a simpler time when wild Skyrim cheese and cabbage physics videos were the best thing on the Internet. The bad news is that you didn’t just wake up from the coma that you had entered after you beat Skyrim. The good news is that Starfield players are bringing that Nostalgia back and making better physics videos than ever before.
It's only been a week since Starfield fully released, but some players have experienced enough to share their tips for others just getting started in the RPG.
Starfield players are encountering yet another bug, but this time, it could be the death of you.
Too often in Starfield, the hum of my ship’s engine is drowned out by a sudden flash of explosion. With a crack, my ship falls apart like a Lego toy. This is entirely my fault for a singular reason: I’m a terrible pilot. My shields may have been made of paper. In searching for tips to improve my flying, I found a solution that doesn’t require me getting good — simply create a ship that’s basically unbeatable due to its monstrous design.
A few things are inevitable in life. Death and taxes, of course. And then there’s Bethesda games having weird, physics-y ways of getting around its systems, as Starfield players are currently doing to steal their way across the galaxy.