After all this time, Bethesda really needed to blow away the competition but instead it’s trailing behind.
After years of waiting, Bethesda has finally shown off Starfield and it looks both expansive and generic. It may seem harsh to call out Starfield from its first gameplay reveal, but there’s little in the demo unveiled at the Xbox Bethesda Showcase released that speaks to the personality of the world. The moon the player lands on, Kreet, is a grey rocky world, with a research station, that’s been taken over by space pirates. It’s a setup that we’ve been seeing in games for years – we could just as easily be looking at a scene from Mass Effect Andromeda, Elite Dangerous, or No Man’s Sky. The player fights their way through the research station, blasting down enemy pirates with pistols, grenades, SMGs, and a double-barreled shotgun. Again, this doesn’t feel like it’s breaking the mold. It could be footage of Obsidian’s Outer Worlds. Bethesda has been working on this game for more than two decades, so it is a little disappointing. This attack on the research station takes place early in Starfield – the pirates the player is killing are only level two – and Bethesda’s Todd Howard tells us that you’ll later be invited to join an organization called Constellation, the last group of explorers in the galaxy. The footage then skips to meeting the members of Constellation in a city called New Atlantis.
