One of the big reveals at Sunday’s showcase was space combat, which according to Howard won’t feel too twitchy. The developer also confirmed that you can board ships and even steal them, as well as smuggle goods across the galaxy as if you were Han Solo. Howard also commented on Starfield’s main quest length, which should be quite a bit larger than Skyrim and Fallout 4’s at around 40 hours. Additionally, he described Starfield as a dream for the modding community. There is some dogfighting. We keep the pace fairly slow, one of the games that I love that we sort of look at for pace is MechWarrior, believe it or not, 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. But the ship stuff is not just dogfighting, as you saw in the video you can dock with other ships, you can disable them, you can board them, there’s actually some quests that involve that, you can steal ships. There’s dialogue in space, there’s space stations you can visit, there’s smuggling, there’s all the things that we would want and we’ll be showing some more of that later but it’s a good chunk of Starfield gameplay that we think is really fun when it comes to playing this type of sci-fi game. Indeed, given the huge amount of real estate (over 100 systems, over 1000 planets), Starfield could include the definitive playground for modders. Bethesda didn’t say yet if the mod tools will be released right alongside the game, though. Starfield should land at some point in early 2023 for PC and Xbox Series S|X.
