If you're bummed that Starfield is not more like No Man's Sky, where you can seamlessly travel from space to planet, there's now a mod available that does just that.
04.09.2023 - 16:09 / ign.com / Todd Howard / Space
Long before Starfield, there was Starflight.
Designed by Greg Johnson and published by Electronic Arts, Starflight imagined a fully-explorable galaxy with an astonishing scale. It did all of this on the Amiga and Commodore 64 – machines with less than one percent of the power of modern PCs.
“The sense of immense scale was absolutely mind-blowing and unlike anything I’d ever thought games could do,” one developer who was inspired by Starlight told me. “Like, in the same year that I was playing NES Mario games, it was a game that felt limitlessly large.”
Starflight’s scope inspired a generation of developers, including a young Todd Howard. But a survey of the modern RPG landscape reveals comparatively few games like it. The list of the most popular RPGs are dominated by fantasy settings, from Ultima and Dragon Quest to Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Witcher. Even games that bill themselves as sci-fi RPGs, like Phantasy Star, have a little bit of that swords and sorcery flavor to them.
You’d think role-playing games that catered to the core fantasy of building a crew and taking to the stars would be more popular given the crossover between Star Trek nerds and role-playing games. But while Mass Effect, The Outer Worlds, and KOTOR have found success over the years, they’ve been dwarfed by the sheer popularity of fantasy RPGs.
“I think it's because fantasy games have a clearer blueprint. It is a very broad setting, can be something wild like Planescape: Torment or Shin Megami Tensei, but you can also just do people with swords in pseudo-Europe killing dragons and people will be happy,” says CRPG Book editor Felipe Pepe.
“Sci-fi is way trickier, way more controversial. People can reject Starfield because it has no aliens, or complain that Shadowrun has elves and orcs. Say that The Outer Worlds plays too safe, but The Technomancer and Kenshi are too weird. Digital Extremes said many times that WarFrame was a nightmare to pitch, no Western publisher had interest in their setting.”
It’s not just RPGs. Fantasy in general seems to have more crossover appeal than sci-fi. A Guardian article titled “The triumph of fantasy fiction” delves into all of the ways that fantasy fiction satisfy a desire to venture into other worlds; the ways that they can titillate with sex and violence. Science fiction, especially stories set in space, have a tendency to be colder, more intellectual, more machine-like. It’s no coincidence that Star Wars, one of the most popular space franchises around, is more fantasy than sci-fi.
The role-playing genre itself is steeped in fantasy. Its origins can be traced back to Dungeons and Dragons, which itself drew heavy inspiration from The Lord of the Rings. Tamriel was created out of a tabletop campaign; Final
If you're bummed that Starfield is not more like No Man's Sky, where you can seamlessly travel from space to planet, there's now a mod available that does just that.
It looks like The Elder Scrolls 6 won't be releasing until 2026 at the very earliest, and our PlayStation pals are likely going to be missing out entirely.
A massive leak of Bethesda's planned release schedule reveals plans for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3 remasters, as well as sequels like Dishonored 3 and Ghostwire: Tokyo 2.
In the world of big-budget video game developers, Bethesda Game Studios has the rare gift of consistency. Play one of its games and you know, more or less, what to expect from all of them: an expansive open world filled with every product a Staples and/or medieval Whole Foods ever sold, mannequin-like characters that will stiffly run through gunfire to ask you to deliver a magic cheese curd, and, most importantly, literature. Tons of books, letters, notes, and emails for you, the player, to read at your leisure, totally unbothered by whatever world-ending crisis you are ostensibly supposed to ward off.
Starfield is getting support for Nvidia DLSS in a future update. In a blog post, Bethesda claimed that it will address some of the highly-requested features and make quality-of-life improvements through a series of regular updates. These include an in-game FOV slider, which so far, players have been adjusting by editing a .ini text file, alongside brightness and contrast controls, and an HDR calibration menu. But before that, the developer has dropped a small hotfix today, to help iron out any ‘top blocker bugs' that are interfering with the general experience in the beloved space RPG. Dubbed version 1.7.29, the hotfix brings improvements to Starfield's performance on the Xbox Series S/X by reducing crashes. It also fixes some quest-ending bugs.
Now that Bethesda’s massive space RPG has been with us for a little while, some of you are already wondering if there will be any Starfield DLC or not. You can’t have seen and done everything yet, though, surely?
It turns out that Starfield has a hidden, but surprisingly robust support for spacewalking - and all you have to do to unlock it is type a few commands into the in-game console.
Opinions on Starfield are all over the place, but two criticisms are pretty widely shared: One, the maps aren't very good, and two, it's a bit disappointing that there aren't any ground vehicles to explore planets with.
If you've been exploring planets in the future, as told by Starfield, you might have noticed a distinct lack of land vehicles. It seems cars, trucks and SUVs are a thing of the past in Starfield's vision for the stars, but game director Todd Howard says adding vehicles would «change the gameplay.»
Bethesda's Todd Howard and Xbox head Phil Spencer have been on the interview circuit for the launch of Starfield, as part of which the pair granted an interview to Bloomberg Technology. While the questions have a more general business focus and veer into things like Game Pass and the Elder Scrolls 6 (no new info), the show starts with Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow rather starkly putting an audience question to Howard: «why did you not optimise this game for PC?»
Play Starfield with mods and wondering why your achievements aren't popping? Then one of the game's latest mods might interest you.
The launch of a new Bethesda Game Studios title is nothing short of an event, and each new title tends to attract the masses in startling numbers. The studio’s long-awaited sci-fi RPG Starfield has launched today after years of anticipation, and it seems Bethesda is expecting it to pull in an even bigger crowd upon release than any of its previous titles have.