Bethesda’s Todd Howard said Starfield features a unique take on space combat, and that was partly inspired by FTL and MechWarrior. And yes, you can steal ships that you board.
Speaking to IGN following the Xbox and Bethesda Game Showcase, Starfield director Howard said “there’s been a lot space sims that we’re fans of, and space shooters from the ’90s,” but the team wanted Starfield “to feel [like] something unique”.
Deploying different amounts of power to different ship subsystems, for example, was influenced by 2012’s spaceship simulation game FTL. In it, players would regularly have to make critical decisions such as choosing between powering their engines to try and escape a fight or their weapons to try and win it.
“Your ship has various power systems. [There’s a] little bit of FTL there in terms of putting how much power into three different weapon systems,” Howard said, “then your engines, and shields, and the grav drive is what lets you jump, and sort of get out of some situations that you have to put power to.”
For its take on dogfighting, Bethesda targeted a, slower pace, and Howard had an unlikely inspiration for that: “One of the games I love that we sort of look at for pace is MechWarrior, believe it or not. That’s probably a little bit slower, but in terms of systems and power and being able to line things up – it’s a little bit faster than that but you know what I mean as opposed to a twitchy dogfighter.”
Starfield’s space combat also includes other less directly violent elements. “We also have some other systems that we’ll show later that you can add to your ship that adds some more interesting gameplay,” said Howard, before going onto list a number of other space-based activities, including hijacking other ships.
“But it’s not just dogfighting, like, the ship stuff includes – you can see it in the video – you can dock with other ships, you can disable them, you can dock, you can board it. There’s actually some quests that involve that. You can steal the ship, there’s dialogue in space, there’s starstations you can visit, there’s smuggling. All the things that we would want. And we’ll be showing some more of that later, but it’s a good chunk of gameplay that we think is really fun when it comes to playing this kind of sci-fi game.”
Howard didn’t go into more detail about those systems, but it sounds as though there’s a lot more to learn than we have already. During the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase, Howard revealed the game will have more than one thousand planets for players to explore and what feels like just as many customisation options.
Players are also speculating whether our own Solar System will be a plot point in the game but Bethesda has at least confirmed some story details thanks to a new trailer, though fans will no doubt continue analysing and speculating about Starfield until it is finally released in 2023.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
