5 things to expect from Starfield releasing in 2022

Starfield, Bethesda's upcoming sci-fi role-playing game, launches this November. The release date aligning with Skyrim (11.11.11) is no coincidence. Starfield is Bethesda's boldest stride in two decades, both in technology and otherwise.

Unlike the typical six-month ad campaigns in other Bethesda Game Studios offerings like Fallout 4, Starfield has had a long, slow, and deliberate series of teasers. The primary idea behind this is to familiarize the gaming community with a completely new intellectual property that only entered public purview in 2018.

In comparison, all other Bethesda Game Studios products have been additions to a relatively longer line of franchise succession - both with The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. For those still off the hook about Starfield, the following are the five things that (so far) qualify as its core definitive elements.

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Top 5 key characteristics that define Starfield

1) NASA-punk futurism

Set in 2330, the in-game world is distant from ours. To be exact, it is in a star-system cluster 50 million light years away from our own solar system. The chief way that the art direction represents this is through Cold-War Era space futurism, as seen in the aesthetic choices of Futurama Fry, Ridley Scott's Alien, or 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This aesthetic, broadly called NASA-punk, has since been lost to the ages as a relic of bygone times, just like its Buzz Aldrin toys.

That being said, The Elder Scrolls series of games has made Bethesda's knack for portraying cultural heterogeneity abundantly clear. The concept arts of various locations and factions say as much.

Aesthetically, the game has enough range to accommodate the wildest techno-anarchist spectrum from the likes of Akila City to something like Neon, which is an intentionally tacky cyber-dystopia.

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2) Huge open world 'made for wanderers'

The chief distinction of the Cold-War Era aesthetic leaning is the hype about space exploration. While the widening boundaries of the vast unknown remains a curious topic humanity continues to pursue, Starfield's goal seems to capture the 70s sense of wonder about space travel.

As the dev diary lays it out, the way this translates to in-game design choices is through the focus on exploration. Bethesda Game Studios has always been a cut above the rest in world design, be it in Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland, or Skyrim's diverse holds.

Starfield's sheer scope of several planetary systems already sets the bar higher, but Todd and his crew seem to be up to the task.

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3) A return to classic RPG roots

Bethesda's first steps into the role-playing sphere were arguably the most formative era in the genre. Arena and Daggerfall, the first Elder Scrolls games, were built on the western computer RPG trends set by the likes of the Ultima and Wizardry series, and experimented with their own tweaks and novelty mechanics.

Over time, however, Bethesda's unique approach to open-world accessibility made them turn away from the hardcore RPG elements last found in Morrowind. Oblivion and Skyrim, much as they modernized the genre for a new generation of gamers, oversaw the gradual erasure of these 'hardcore' CRPG ideas of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons ancestry.

Along with it, however, some essential role-playing elements were also stripped away from these games. As Todd Howard remarks in 'Made for Wanderers', episode 2 of dev diaries:

"It's nice with Starfield to go back to some things we didn't do... the backgrounds, the traits, defining your character, all those stats."

Bethesda's ongoing project, thus, is their opportunity to retain their public goodwill by doing 'older hardcore RPG' features 'in a new way'.

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4) Dynamic lifelike companions

Bethesda's biggest game to date, Skyrim, had 66 followers, discounting the DLCs. However, most of them were only barebone shadows of player class archetypes with no memorable personality. Standouts like Lydia were more so from their accessibility and quirks rather than character complexity.

Serana, the vampire companion introduced with the Dragonborn DLC, was perhaps their most successful point at creating a follower both competent in combat and compelling as a partner during exploration.

Starfield seems to be even more character-focused. Game director Istvan Pely highlights a design priority on creating player companions who dynamically interact with and comment on the environment - a department Dragon Age excels in.

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5) The next stage for Bethesda's in-house engine

Starfield will be the debut field application for Creation Engine 2, the next stage of Bethesda Game Studios' homebrew gaming engine and SDK. The genesis of Creation Engine itself lies in a fork of the age-old Gamebryo platform, created from the ground up to accommodate Morrowind's 3D physics-enabled clutter back in the early 2000s.

The new Creation Engine 2 may not trump innovative tech like Unreal Engine 5, but it seems to be a remake of Creation Engine from scratch, suiting the needs of next-gen graphics.

Admittedly, there is little information about the tech backend other than the state-of-the-art photogrammetry used in textures. Presumably, it will at least keep the company, now a part of the Microsoft tent, in the industry's next-gen race - which will be a big step up for BGS games.