Certain Affinity Is Working on an Original FPS After Years of Assisting with Halo and Other Games

You may have heard about a little space game called Starfield, the gravitational pull from which risks swallowing all games discourse for months and possibly years to come. Perhaps that's no surprise for a game that's been in development and hyped for as long as any title that I can remember (well, ones that have shipped anyway) but it's easy to forget now the thing's in our hands that it was subject to multiple delays along the way.

One of the biggest draws about Starfield is the number of planets you can explore. It’s not so much an open-world game as it is more of an open-galaxy title. With that, you might understandably want these giant balls of rock to look their best. That’s where the modding community comes into its own.

With millions of players having already jumped right into the thick of it with Starfield, it’s hard to deny the fact that a non-insignificant number of them are facing performance issues on powerful PC hardware. When the director Todd Howard was asked about these issues, he responded in a way that some might say was tone-deaf. Notably, he said that Starfield was optimized and that some PC gamers might simply need to upgrade their rigs for it to run properly. A bold statement, to be sure, but one that may also ring hollow following some strange discoveries from the open-source community.

Modders have already been getting busy in Starfield, rolling out both useful changes, and things that are just a bit of fun. One such fun mod has replaced all of the United Colonies’ guards in New Atlantis with Stormtroopers, which is something I think we can all say we saw coming. 

Starfield has you spending plenty of time in your spaceships, so it’s worth investing some time into making them as capable as possible. Some players have grown quite attached to their ships, and it’s not a surprise, as the game gives you the freedom to customize them as you please. If you’re sufficiently ambitious and have the imagination for it, some incredibly impressive ships can be made, including the Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars.

In an interview with Famitsu, Starfield lead and Bethesda frontman Todd Howard stated that the game's mod support «will be available next year» (obtained via machine translation), which likely refers to Starfield's equivalent to the Creation Kit modding tools for Skyrim and Fallout 4.

Starfield players have already made some incredibly useful mods, like a fix for the frustrating inventory system or the addition of DLSS support, but they've also added some very silly things like hairy chests, colourful juice boxes, and the lasagne loving cat Garfield.

In late 2001, the dot-com crash struck ZeniMax, and a team of thirty-some developers in the company’s basement feared for their jobs. They were late delivering their new role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, to Microsoft; their board of directors had begun having doubts about the whole videogame enterprise. People were pulling seven-day workweeks on something none of them were sure would ever see the light of day. Morale was in the toilet.

For the past five years, the YouTuber Bacon_ has been uploading funny video game clips, nearly all of which come from titles made by Bethesda Game Studios. With the release of Starfield this week, Bacon_ has new fodder. “Just trying to get through my shift,” which was posted four days ago, shows a Starfield NPC pounding a mining laser into his colleague’s crotch. “So Starfield is out, and it’s definitely a Bethesda game,” Bacon_commented.

Bethesda’s Todd Howard has seemingly teased plans to reveal its Indiana Jones game in 2024.

Religion is one of the themes in Starfield, and to help make the theme and the existing religions in the game feel more believable, Bethesda rehired one of its former writers who had left to become a Jesuit priest.

Space is big and, for the most part, kind of dull. The heady thrill of setting foot on planets no human has ever seen aside, most of the celestial bodies in our universe are just big, complicated rocks when you get right down to it. For better or worse, that's a part of reality that Starfield deliberately tries to capture, according to a recent NYT interview (via VG247) with Ashley Cheng, Bethesda's managing director, and Todd Howard, who is Todd Howard.