Starting a new job is a high-risk engagement. Anyone who accidentally insults their colleagues, destroys the coffee machine or clogs the toilet in the first few hours can actually leave right away.
In Starfield, things are a little different: we start fresh as miners for the Argos company, deep below the surface of the moon Vectera – in the year 2330.
We don’t clog the factory toilet, but we discover an artifact under a mountain of rubble. When we touch it, somehow the universe flows through us and we faint.
What did the mysterious object do to us, why did we of all people touch it? And above all: what do we do now?
We get the first answers a little later, a few planets away in the city of New Amsterdam, from a group called Constellation. The members don’t know very much either, so we set out to find more artifacts and knowledge.
In Starfield we control a character that we create ourselves in the editor at the beginning of the game. In addition to looks, we’re setting a few special abilities, such as special skill with rifles and pistols. Alternatively, we unlock these extras later when leveling in several stages.
The first few sections and battles on the ground and in space still seem like a tutorial. However, Starfield gets going much faster than the last games from the developer studio bethesda. After half an hour or an hour we are already in the middle of the game and experiencing adventures in a huge world.
We control our alter ego either in the first person perspective or in the external view. We first operated our PC test version with a keyboard and mouse – which works quite well. However, we’ve since switched to the gamepad because we find it a bit more comfortable even in first-person firefights.
One thing we envisioned differently beforehand is the structure of the Starfield universe. This is a relatively complicated thing: there is no world in one piece, but many small sections that are shoveled into memory again and again.
There are the environments for the actual missions, in which we shoot our way through icy research stations, caves with alien beasts, space stations, bank buildings and entertainment districts.
Video: Starfield – Trailer (June 2023)
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In these areas we engage in firefights in order to progress in the main story and in the side quests. There is a lot of variety and a lot to discover – including some unusual areas, which we do not want to spoil here.
A second type of environment is the cities. What is meant is New Amsterdam, which even consists of several individual levels. Here and throughout the game we regularly see loading screens, but only briefly – no wonder that the program explicitly requires an SSD even in the minimum requirements.