What you should actually expect from Starfield

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In this video, the speaker discusses what to expect from Starfield, highlighting its similarities to previous Bethesda games in terms of open-world exploration, character customization, combat, decision-making, and faction systems. They express a healthy skepticism about bugs and graphics but anticipate improved gameplay mechanics, including upgraded gunplay, mobility options, and the inclusion of factions, as well as a greater sense of scale and exploration with the ability to venture into different planets.

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Video Transcript

Starfield Starfield Starfield Starfield we’re less than a month away from bethesda’s first new IP in 25 years and the conversation around what Starfield will and won’t be is running wild it will be good it will be trash it will be buggy it will be revolutionary and funniest of all to me that modders will save it like Skyrim needed saving I’m here to tell you exactly what you should expect from Starfield the answer is right in front of all of our faces and in every other Bethesda game we’ve ever played just a few weeks ago I played Morrowind for the first time stop you violated the law yes I know I’m a bad person my first bgs game was Oblivion back in 2006 so I just never went back to Morrowind but after playing that game for a few hours I realized something that sounds crazy until you actually think about it Starfield will have more in common with Morrowind than any other non-bethesda game and another way of saying this is across 20 years of open World Games Bethesda hasn’t really changed their formula and every single one of their games you’re creating that character you’re exploring a vast World talking to people getting into fights making decisions and choosing your own path no one else at least in my eyes has replicated that same feeling and that’s why for me I expect Starfield to be a special game it’s going to have all of those things and I’m going to love it like I’ve loved every other Bethesda game and that means I’m gonna love it because it’s a Bethesda game you might hear that and spit out your drink like really did this guy play Fallout 76 of course I did I made so many videos about it and ultimately decided it wasn’t for me I’ve experienced the highs of Bethesda with Skyrim and Fallout and the low with Fallout 76. yeah you heard me right the single low I do think it’s fair to have a healthy skepticism about bethesda’s ability to deliver after a game like Fallout 76 but to tell you the truth five years later I see that game as a spin-off is a fun side project where they tried something completely different that they had never done before now don’t get me wrong I I don’t like Fallout 76 I’ve gone back to it many times and it’s just not for me in fact I try to erase it from my mind like a since memories being wiped the point is going into Starfield expecting Fallout 76 is like going into Starfield expecting no man’s Sky you’re gonna be disappointed because that’s just not the game it’s going to be moving on so what should you expect from Starfield I think you should expect it to be a Bethesda game but the problem is just saying that doesn’t cut it anymore I really don’t think people know what a Bethesda game is it gets lost in this toxic nuclear Wasteland that is social media discourse after E3 2022 when they showed off starfield’s gameplay these started popping up everywhere and I don’t think it takes 10 intelligence to realize it earns you a lot of fake Internet points to say stuff like this I don’t have Starfield right in front of me but what I do have is Google and Google tells me that bethesda’s Mainline open world video games they sell very well and they are generally well liked and to me as long as Bethesda is sticking to that formula that they’ve been using for 20 years and it’s backed up by all of the gameplay that we’ve seen which by the way is a lot more than most games before they come out then yeah I have no problems taking my claim I think I’m really gonna like Starfield let’s get into specifics what exactly can you expect from Starfield bucks I absolutely expect bugs in Starfield even though they’ve had all this time to polish if you consider yourself a card-carrying Bethesda fan like myself you know bugs are a part of the experience pretty much no matter what so I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that this won’t have any bugs because they’ve had the extra year of Polish I actually do expect there to still be bugs in the game because all their games have had them and most games these days unfortunately still launch with bugs it’s no excuse minding you but I think there’s a really black and white sort of perception of bugs that doesn’t really ring true at least for me it really depends on the kind of game whether I have a tolerance for bugs or not if I like the game already and I’m having fun bugs don’t bother me all that much I’m still gonna play it and I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope that they patch it as soon as possible unless there’s like a game breaking bug like legitimately something that wipes your save and makes you lose all of your progress and a ton of time then I just don’t don’t see bugs in a Bethesda game bothering me all that much the next thing you should expect is Graphics that look like a Bethesda game in the last five to ten years I think we’ve gotten very close to photorealistic games at least there are some studios out there that are aspiring to make their games look almost like real life when it works man it’s incredible it’s some of the most amazing stuff and it’s still the reason I love to play games today but more often than not it doesn’t work and I find myself questioning whether they should have gone for a realistic look or gone for something more artistic more stylized that will age better when I look at Starfield the approach to me is very obvious they’re not going for photorealism with this game the environments they look good I mean they look better than any other Bethesda game we’ve played so far but I’m not playing Red Dead Redemption 2 and then going to Starfield and being like what wait what what happened here that’s just a level of low G moon jump logic in terms of expectations that I don’t think makes much sense same thing goes with these characters I just don’t think they look that great that’s probably the harshest criticism I could give for Starfield but at the same time I don’t really care that’s never been an expectation or a priority or a sticking point for me with bethesda’s games and in fact there were a lot prettier games than Fallout 3 when it came out in 2008 much prettier when Skyrim came out in 2011 much prettier when Fallout 4 came out in 2015. I expect Starfield to look like a Bethesda game and with the improvements that they’ve shown us that is plenty for me in terms of combat what I’m expecting is an upgraded version of Fallout 4’s gun play where that game took a step forward with combat feeling more in line with what modern games were doing it looks like starfield’s already taking that step forward even further with the gameplay I mean compared this gameplay we just got a month ago to what we got a year ago and the difference is night and day guns look great in action like they actually have feedback and reactivity versus what we had before I’m not expecting starfield’s Gunplay to feel on par with the best of the best Shooters of the day because starfield’s not just a shooter then again you have the jump pack which makes a ton of sense because we’re going to be covering a lot more ground than any other Bethesda game we have before the map is just infinitely larger if you think about all the places we can visit but I think that’s going to make the moment-to-moment combat feel unique compared to other Bethesda games where you really didn’t have a lot of options in terms of mobility and combat another part of the game you should expect to feel like Bethesda is the dialogue now I couldn’t tell you how happy I was when I learned that this game was not gonna have a voice protagonist it might be the single biggest change they’ve ever made to their formula when they decide to do one for Fallout 4 and while some people enjoyed the upgraded presentation obviously it’s better to see your character speak the words that you’re choosing that also came with a pre-scripted tone it was harder to role play get into your character and really get immersed when you were seeing your character talk rather than choosing the options yourself this is like the only area where I see Starfield taking a step back but in my mind it’s a step forward just see Baldur’s Gate 3 which came out recently and has just been catching on fire like crazy that game does not have a voice protagonist why because there are so many dialogue options so much reactivity so much variability so much letting the player decide their own path letting you choose how you you want to respond what kind of person you want to be is huge in these games and there’s no clear signal that Bethesda realizes that than them deciding to walk back that choice with Fallout 4 and say you know what we want to get rid of the voice because we want you to go back into that mode of fully immersing yourself in our world I really think Starfield will go above and beyond what we got in Fallout 4. I think it’ll go back to Skyrim and Fallout 3 in New Vegas that really gave us a lot of options you can be absolutely just evil the worst person you can be good just a patron saint or you can go somewhere in between with a lot of granularity player agency is so key in bethesda’s games and in some of my favorite games flat out in general and it’s something I think you should expect Starfield to do really well the next expectation is exploration and yeah this is gonna feel a lot like every other Bethesda game of course this has been a huge talking point ever since they’ve told us they’re using procedural generation to make these worlds and that there’s gonna be 1 000 different planets we can explore in the game now a monkey can figure out that they’ve been using procedural Generations since Morrowind so that’s really not something that bothers me but there is quite a significant change here in terms of their other games in that we have a freaking Starship right that we’re going to be able to fly around in space approach a planet choose a landing spot and then be able to explore that entire planet so to me there’s going to be a larger sense of scale in terms of exploration like stumbling upon a planet will be more in the common experience of exploring in Starfield rather than stumbling upon a cave in Skyrim or Fallout maybe that cave gave you a little 10 minute thing to do or you would go through read some notes get some backstory and what happened there get some fun loot and then leave in Starfield that gameplay Loop is going to be elongated maybe there’s something larger going on with that planet with even more branching you know side quests and other things to find and explore but at the same time this is different the scale is entirely different we can’t expect every single planet to have something going on there which is why we already know that only 10 of the planets in Starfield are going to have actual life on them so for that reason it makes sense to expect plenty of empty and Barren Landscapes but that’s part of the space experience which is why when I see the talking point that Starfield is going to have a bunch of empty Barren Landscapes I say well yes that’s what space is like and that’s also what they’ve told us so that’s exactly what I expect to me exploration in Bethesda games has always been proportionate to how patient I am and how willing I am to immerse myself am I willing to go off the beaten path and fully explore that thing that’s catching my eye or am I rushing from story beat to story beat in order to beat the main game I think the expect Nation should be with all the other Bethesda games the main story is really not the main attraction it’s everything else about the experience as long as they’re able to thread that needle and increase the scale while also keeping that Bethesda feeling exploration then yes I think we should expect that the next expectation should be a really wide variety of options in terms of how you’re playing this game and that kind of goes with the voice protagonist angle but not just with dialogue with actual gameplay they’ve shown us footage of creating your character there’s something called a background which will fundamentally change how the world perceives you and you get to choose that in terms of leveling in perks they went with the Skyrim route so you’re actually going to train up whatever you’re using and as you use it more you will get better at that thing rather than the Fallout way which is to say I’m going to spend points to get better at the thing so then I can do things better I’m sure that was not confusing at all but yeah sort of your options and what you’re able to do how you’re able to approach situations pretty much relies on your character and what you’ve chosen in terms of levels and skills and so on and so forth from what I’ve been able to find there’s 82 total skills and they’re split into five different categories and each of those 82 have different ranks so in Skyrim there were 18 different skills with varying levels of ranks and in Fallout 4 there were seven different skill types and 10 different perks so there were 70 skills it’s pretty black and white to see that there’s more granularity in Starfield in terms of how you’re building your character than there has ever been in any of bethesda’s games which again means more options more approaches to how you play the game and just more role-playing in a very RPG way than we’ve seen before that should absolutely be the expectation let’s talk about what you should expect in terms of crafting now crafting has always been in their games in some form or fashion but ever since Fallout 4 it’s been like greatly expanded not only can you place objects in the world you can Orient them in whatever way you want so it’s just like creatively you could just do so many things spacecrafting or Outpost crafting is in Starfield so the expectation should be pretty much the same amount of variability that we had before hopefully a higher build limit without mods that would be really nice and this also extends to creating your own Starship they showed us that system and we’ve also been told that it’s going to be sort of a later game thing so you’re not going to be able to afford like a really cool Starship at the beginning but anyways the expectation should absolutely be that level of variability if not more with Starfield and just thinking back to the things you could do in Fallout 4 with all the expansions sort of really buffing out that settlement crafting building system I think it’s more than fair air and even safe to expect a similar level of attention to detail with outposts building in Starfield they’ve shown us even a glimpse of what it looks like and surprising no one or at least it shouldn’t be it looks a lot like Fallout 4. they’ve shown us we can assign people to specific jobs even hire random people to work on our outposts and gosh I mean the the possibilities on what you can do in an outpost they seem almost infinite to me so I’m not really going to speculate on what we can and can’t do in an outpost I would at least expect that it’s the same as Fallout 4 just more stuff and that also matches my expectation for our Starship I’m sure we’re going to be able to assign crew to different jobs and whatever they’re going to be able to do is you know sort of up to the confines of what’s possible in Starfield but this was another moment where I was like oh my God we can get out of our chair and walk around our ship and talk to our companions like obviously as a Mass Effect fan that made me very happy but just in terms of the possibilities for this game and for Bethesda games and General this is so exciting to me the next thing you should expect is something Bethesda has always done well which is factions different groups of people that you can align with or declare war against or do something in between you know there is some sort of larger political Intrigue going on in the world some of them will be absolutely chaotic maybe like the Crimson Fleet they look like the anarchists of the group and then there’s the United Collective which seemed like the NCR to me and then there’s constellation which I hate to say it but they really do kind of look like the Minutemen of Starfield just kind of like that lukewarm like limp noodle faction the Freestar Collective they look like you know space Western bounty hunters there’s just so much going on here and I doubt this is all of the factions in the game but they’ve already shown us this stuff and I think it’s more than reasonable to expect the depth of these factions to be at the same level or deeper than anything we saw in Skyrim or Fallout 4. now at this point and I think I remember this with Fallout 4 and Skyrim we don’t really know the stakes right like the Civil War that happens in Skyrim I think that was kind of hint to that but until you actually played that game you didn’t know how deep that ran through the veins of that game and how it affected everyone same thing goes with Fallout 4 with the synths and sort of the paranoia around that and the Institute and the Brotherhood all vying for power in the Commonwealth imagine those kinds of conflicts but stretched across multiple planets different parts of the system that we’re going to be exploring imagine two corporations vying over the you know precious resources of an entire planet I don’t know I’m just speculating here but I think those are all within the realm of expectation for Starfield it just makes sense that’s how Bethesda has made their games before they’re building out an entire new like basis of lore for an entirely new IP guys and so just hearing that come out of my mouth gives me goosebumps and it reminds me of the first time I played the Mass Effect series and fell in love with that world and at lore and learning about how everything came to be in the future that’s what Starfield is it’s a Sci-Fi futuristic game we’re gonna have that same stuff but in a new world and just like all other Bethesda games it’s gonna be dense there’s going to be plenty to dive into and read and soak in there’s so many expectations that I think make sense so this video could be much longer but I’m gonna end it with one final expectation you’re gonna get lost in Starfield what I mean by that is you are going to think you know what you’re doing but you’re gonna get distracted you’re gonna find something new you’re gonna dive into that and you’re gonna spend a bunch of time on it and then you’re gonna forget what you were even doing in the first place that’s a sensation I’ve had in every single Bethesda game I’ve played and it’s one that I absolutely expect in Starfield maybe even on a greater level just because of the scale Bethesda games have always had Radiance procedurally generated design whether it’s the maps or the missions themselves even going back to Morrowind but the difference for me is I think it really kind of fits a space game to have that sort of you know system in place to keep things fresh and to bring us to brand new places across once again 1 000 total planets so guys that is what you should expect from Starfield at least according to me and I know that’s definitely not the end of the list the list is probably exhaustive on how Bethesda games have been made for 20 years and how that will you know relate and be reflected in Starfield but I hope I got my point across because I think it’s pretty obvious like Starfield is a Bethesda game and I think you should expect it to be a Bethesda game whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing to you is up to you so I hope you guys enjoyed this commentary as you can tell I’m beyond hyped for Starfield I’m so excited and it’s really not very far away so I don’t think you’ll be seeing very many more Starfield videos for me until the game is out and in my hands so make sure and like the video If you enjoyed if you don’t want to miss future Starfield videos make sure you’re subscribed and also hit that Bell so you don’t miss my next one thank you guys so much for watching and I will talk to you next time

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Starfield, developed by Bethesda, is a highly anticipated game launch - the first new Intellectual Property (IP) from Bethesda in over 25 years. From what the author of the commentary expects, Starfield will stay true to Bethesda’s formula for open-world, exploration-driven games, focusing on user-character creation, abundant exploration opportunities, and combat mechanics.

The author highlights that Starfield, being a Bethesda game, will likely come with its share of bugs and graphics that reflect Bethesda’s signature aesthetic rather than photorealism. It will also likely share similar combat and dialogues mechanics with its predecessors, giving players the ability to shape their own stories and character experiences.

Another key expectation for Starfield is in-depth crafting, similar to what was available in Fallout 4. Settlement crafting was a significant part of Fallout 4, and the author expects the same level of detail and customization to be present in Starfield. The ability to craft and personalize Starships increases the level of user immersion in the game.

A unique feature the author expects is the presence of factions, which has been a staple in Bethesda games. Players will be able to align themselves with different groups, each with their unique goals and ethos. The author also emphasizes that with the increased number of skills and customization options in Starfield, players will get even more immersive role-playing experience.

Exploration forms a substantial part of Bethesda’s gaming experience. In Starfield, this aspect will be elevated thanks to the use of a Starship, which allows players to travel to different planets. However, as is the case with space, some of these planets will be barren, reflecting the vast emptiness that can sometimes be space.

Given all these factors, the author underlines that playing Starfield will be a time-intensive endeavor. Whether it’s crafting, exploring, or developing your character, players will be drawn into intricate details that may extend gameplay time. Despite the game’s scale, the author is confident that Bethesda will maintain its signature exploratory experience.

In conclusion, Starfield is expected to be an immersive, open-world game that combines familiar features from previous Bethesda games, such as exploration, crafting, and faction alignment, with new elements such as Starship travel and customization. Despite expecting some bugs and non-photorealistic visuals, the author is eagerly looking forward to the game’s release.