Bethesda had a busy E3 this year. Alongside revealing new games in the Wolfenstein, Doom, and Elder Scrolls franchises, the publisher also announced Starfield, their next big open-world RPG and an original sci-fi IP. We certainly can’t wait to find out more, but what do we know already? Do we know the Starfield release date? What is in the trailer? Will it come out on current-gen consoles? Here’s everything we know.
Starfield Release Date
At the moment, the game does not yet have any sort of official release date. However, in an interview with Geoff Keighley following their E3 conference, director Todd Howard revealed that Starfield was in full production at the studio. The Elder Scrolls 6, on the other hand, was only in pre-production. He said that “we enter production we move the bulk of the studio to that game.” This suggests that most of Bethesda Game Studios, the publisher’s internal developer, is working on the game. In all honesty though, some don’t expect it to come out this console generation.
Starfield News
The game will be Bethesda’s first original internally-developed franchise in 25 years (they’ve published original IPs such as The Evil Within more recently). In an interview with VentureBeat, Todd Howard said that Starfield has been worked on for around ten years at the studio, but only entered full production after Bethesda Game Studios shipped Fallout 4 in 2015.
It will be primarily single-player, not a shared universe like Fallout 76. The game will be recognizable as a Bethesda RPG, but will also have “a lot of new systems that we’ve been thinking about for a while, things that fit that kind of game well.” Presumably this could be some sort of space travel, but it’s too early to speculate. Bethesda will be announcing more in the future.
Starfield Rumors
There are a number of rumors circling this game, most of which are shady and unsubstantiated. The biggest is that the game is far closer to release than people may think, and may even release in Fall 2019, although 2020 may be more likely. There are between four to seven planets you can visit, all with a land-mass either bigger or only slightly smaller than Skyrim. The visuals are supposedly incredible, far better than anything Bethesda has put out so far (this is probably a given). The space station seen in the trailer is actually a ship and the game’s main hub area, but there won’t be any ship-to-ship combat.
Again, these are all unconfirmed rumors, so make of them what you will. Expect them to only increase in number as Starfield’s development continues.
Starfield Platforms
Starfield, like The Elder Scrolls 6, has not confirmed platforms. But, according to Bethesda, Starfield is coming out before The Elder Scrolls 6, meaning that it is more likely to come to the PS4 and Xbox One as well as the PC.
And since we still don’t know the release date or when the next batch of consoles will come out, it might be a game that hits the PS4 and Xbox One as well as those successors. However, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion came out for the PC and Xbox 360 in 2006 but did not also come to the original Xbox. It doesn’t prove anything but does show that Bethesda is willing to forgo this generation of consoles to take advantage of the new hardware.
Starfield Trailer
Bethesda did show a small trailer for Starfield at E3 2018 when Bethesda Director and Executive Producer Todd Howard announced the game. It was just a teaser trailer though, meaning it didn’t show us much. The trailer had a ship, space, and not much else to go on. We will likely see another trailer at some point in the next year and a half.
Starfield Multiplayer
While nothing has been officially announced, it does not sound like Starfield will have multiplayer. The upcoming Fallout 76 aside, Bethesda is not known for multiplayer games. And while that could change as they adapt and evolve, VP of Marketing Pete Hines talked to FZ.se about the studio’s role in single-player development.
“[The announcement] also helps convince folks, like, look, this is not forever-more what we’re doing,” he said. “We are going to do a game that’s just single-player next time around, and yes, we are going to get to Elder Scrolls 6,” Hines said. “There’s going to be a long time before we’re ready to talk about what those are, because we want the time between when we start to talk about it and it comes out to not be two years long or three years long. But it just gives folks a better idea of where we’re headed and understanding what the studio is working on and trying to do.”
“We are going to do a game that’s just single-player next time around” does heavily imply that Starfield will be in the same vein as the studio’s other offline RPGs.
