A random bartender on a small back-world planet led to one of my favorite side-quests in Starfield, Bethesda’s latest and biggest open-world RPG. Just be prepared for some gravity issues.
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Starfield is one of the biggest games of 2023, and has already become one of Xbox’s most successful Game Pass offerings. The Bethesda RPG, like that developer’s past games, is filled with characters to meet, creatures to kill, items to collect, and quests to finish. And this time around, you get to explore 1,000 planets (while discovering the dead animals on them). While most quests in Starfield are fine, a few are better than the rest and worth tracking down. For example, a quest involving a broken-down spaceship, some expensive booze, and fighting space pirates in zero-G.
“Sure Bet” is a side-quest you can start at any point in the game past the opening tutorial. Once you have your own ship and can make the journey to Gagarin, a planet located in the Alpha Centauri system, you can talk to Lizzy, a bartender in the small, industrial city of Gagarin Landing. The place is being overrun by corporate execs and she wants to serve better, finer, and more expensive liquor to attract these rich sleazebags. So she asks you, of course, to track down some valuable booze lost on an abandoned cargo ship.
I didn’t expect much when I took the quest but hopped over to the derelict ship, and within a minute realized this was going to be a different experience than most fetch quests in Starfield. That’s because the ship you board isn’t working properly, and the machinery running its artificial gravity is failing. So every 30 seconds or so the gravity in the ship turns off and you, all the objects in the vessel, and all the space pirates looting it begin floating in zero-G.
Bethesda / Game Guides Channel
This leads to some really fun combat, where you can use the shifts in gravity to your advantage to quickly reach higher locations or to target enemies who get knocked out of cover and float into the open air. I also had a great moment when I fired my big, dumb shotgun and went zooming backward into a wall.
“Oh right, physics!” I thought to myself as I jetpacked back into the action with a big smile on my face. After the fighting ends, the grav shifts continue and lead to some light but enjoyable traversal puzzles. Once I got the booze I left, returned to Lizzy, passed a persuasion check, and got more money than she had initially promised.
Starfield has received a lot of criticism for its locked 30fps framerate on console, and while I always prefer a higher framerate when possible, this quest is a reminder of why Bethesda’s RPG probably can’t hit 60. When the gravity first went out in the ship, every object, weapon, and body around me began to float into the air. Then they all landed a moment later when the ship started working again. This repeated at least 50 or so times during the quest, and each time Starfield tracked and maintained where these objects were, how they collided with other items, and their momentum.
Meanwhile, I and some dozen other pirates were shooting each other, ramming through all of this debris, and tossing grenades too. That’s a lot of stuff to render, track, and calculate. So it’s not surprising that Starfield has to cap the framerate at 30fps to spend its resources on other things.
Of course, there’s an argument to be made that Bethesda’s latest RPG doesn’t fully utilize all these wild simulations running under the hood. And I’d agree with that. Most quests don’t feel like they are taking advantage of the game’s impressive physics, or other novel systems for that matter.
However, when a quest like “Sure Bet” comes along, it’s a great example of what this game can actually achieve. I just wish Starfield remembered that more often.
Starfield is packed with many sights to see, secrets to uncover, factions to join, junk to pick up, and, most importantly: quests. One of the best side quests discovered thus far involves a ship full of some unlucky people stranded in a planet’s orbit. Fortunately (or unfortunately), you’ve arrived and are ready to put your negotiation (or sabotage) skills to work.
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“First Contact” can be found by traveling to Porrima II in the Porrima star system. There you’ll meet the crew of the ECS Constant, who it seems are a little out of time and place. If you’re a Star Trek fan, this quest’s story is very similar to “The Neutral Zone” in season one of The Next Generation. So, here’s where to find “First Contact,” along with a few tips to get the most out of this maybe-somewhat disturbing sidequest.
Starfield: How to start ‘First Contact’
By traveling to Porrima II, you’ll get the option to start working on “First Contact.” But before you jump into the plight of the crew of the ECS Constant, I’d advise finishing the second part of the quest “Unearthed,” which sends you to Earth for a bit of a history lesson.
“Unearthed” isn’t a prerequisite for “First Contact” and it won’t alter the quest at all, but crossing this quest off your list first will fill you in on an essential bit of Starfield’s human history. I won’t spoil the details, but I found it to frame “First Contact” in a very narratively satisfying, unnerving, way.
Once you’re in Porrima II’s orbit, you’ll receive a message from an NPC named Jiro Sugiyama on the planet asking for a bit of help. Fly down and have a chat with him.
Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku
Sugiyama will explain that thus far no one’s been able to directly communicate with the orbiting ship and that he wants you to figure out what exactly is going on.
Back up in orbit, you can dock with the ship after failing to establish communication. Remember, you can dock with a ship once you’re under 500 meters of it, so no need to get too close for comfort.
Here’s where the fun begins: After stepping foot on the Constant, you’ll learn that it’s a colony ship sent from Earth before humanity discovered faster-than-light travel. The Constant’s trip took about 200 years, and has seen multiple generations live and die on board, all with the hope of settling on Porrima II. But that hope runs into a bit of a problem, as the fine corporate folks who’ve established the Paradiso resort planetside got there first.
’First Contact’: Meet with Paradiso’s board members
Before jumping back down to the planet for a board meeting (exciting, I know), take some time to meet the various people who live on the ECS Constant. You’ll find all sorts of folks, including a classroom full of kids. Ddon’t forget that: There are children aboard this vessel.
Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku
After you get a chance to speak with and learn about the crew who’ve spent their entire lives living on this ship, go on down to Paradiso and head to the elevator in the resort. Take it to the executive floor and head straight for the board room.
The receptionist will have the nerve to tell you that you can’t go in there. Unacceptable: Doesn’t she know you’re the protagonist of a Bethesda game? Unbelievable. You won’t have to work hard to convince her to let you in. Just tell her what you’re here to discuss then, as you should with any corporate board meeting, just walk in and demand attention.
Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku
Once inside the boardroom, you’ll have an opportunity to hear the suits and ties plan their schemes, one of which includes building artificial hot springs. Capitalism never changes.
Let them wrap their disgusting conversation and talk with the CEO, Oliver. You’ll be given three wonderful options here:
Arrange for the ECS Constant crew members to live on Porrima II as indentured servants.
Outfit the ECS Constant with a grav drive so the crew can find somewhere else to live.
Kill the entire crew of the ECS Constant.
Now, if the power these suits and ties wield over helpless people inspires a relatable bloodlust and you want to kill them, you can forget about it: Like vampires, they’ll just get back up every time you pump bullets into them.
The icky choice: Sending the ECS Constant crew into indentured servitude
If you take choice one, god help you. But you’ll need to get some materials first: 40 fiber, 80 iron, 10 lithium, 20 sealant. At least do the right thing and mine it from the planet you’re currently on, rather than going elsewhere to mine your blood materials. You can also convince the crew of the ECS Constant to contribute what little they have, but it won’t be enough. Once you’ve gathered those materials, inform the ship’s captain.
Afterwards, I suggest taking a cold shower IRL so you can find out if you’re still capable of feeling anything.
The better option: Fitting the ECS Constantout with a grav drive
Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku
The second choice is probably the best out of all three. As theECS Constant was built before grav drives were invented, you’ll have to travel to HopeTech on the planet Polvo in the Valo system. Once planetside, go inside HopeTech and speak with Bennu St. James on the second floor. He’ll charge you 40,000 credits for the grav drive, but if your Persuasion is efficient enough, you can talk him down to 25,000. You can also shop for ship parts for yourself at HopeTech, and check out the halfway decent weapons shop there too.
Head on back to the ECS Constant and chat with the engineer, Amin Kazemi. He’ll ask you to do the following to prep the Constant for its new grav drive:
Reroute power from the port turbopump to the auxiliary cryogenic radiator from engineering control computer alpha
Set the plasma run-off inhibitor to five percent on engineering control computer beta
Decouple the magnetic flange pipe enclosures from the auxiliary module assembly on engineering control computer gamma
Once these options have been set in engineering, go have a talk with the ship’s captain one last time to let her know the ECS Constant is set for faster-than-light travel. The ship will depart shortly after you leave the system. And who knows? Maybe you’ll run into these folks again on your travels.
Only monsters need apply: Killing innocent people because they’re inconvenient to rich people
If for some reason you’re set on destroying the ECS Constant and killing everyone on board, first, get help, but second, you’ll need to grab a key from Amin Kazemi in engineering on the Constant. Violently assaulting him is sure to set off alarms, so instead you can choose to pickpocket him (note: you need to unlock the Pickpocketing skill in the perk tree to be able to do such a thing).
Once you have the key, use it on the locked computer in Engineering and set the ship to Emergency Overload. Then go to the captain’s office to use her computer (note: this requires the Security skill in the perk tree) and confirm the overload request. Once you do this, everyone will want to kill you (I don’t blame them whatsoever). Escape the Constant and watch the ship explode. Good job. You’ll get 6,500 credits from the CEO and unlimited access to the Paradiso resort.
“First Contact” is somewhat of a cruel story no matter which choice you take. Though sending the ECS Constant out to hopefully find a new home is likely the better choice, the reality that corporations control entire planets from a single settlement and can so powerfully affect the lives of vulnerable people certainly makes the case for seeing Starfield as a dystopian work of fiction that painfully resonates with all-to-true realities here in the real world.
In the months (nay, years) leading up to Starfield’s September 6 release, the hype for the Bethesda RPG grew and grew until it was a heretofore unseen beast, a giant Kaiju of expectation that threatened to take down Sony, upend 2023’s GOTY race, and suck up all of gamers’ precious free time.
Head of Xbox Creator Experience Sarah Bond joined in on the fun, calling Starfield “one of the most important RPGs ever made.” Bethesda head Pete Hines said it took him well over 100 hours to properly start Starfield. All of the hype whipped Xbox fans into a frenzy, and indirectly fueled the flickering flames of the console wars. Starfield’s scope, its potential, even made the then-unreleased game a talking point in the FTC trial regarding Microsoft’s purchase of Activision-Blizzard.
Then, after a few days in what Bethesda dubbed “early access,” available to deep-pocketed players who shelled out big bucks for one of several premium editions, Starfield launched. It is surprisingly not buggy, and jam-packed with side-quests that offer a steady drip of serotonin. But it’s woefully inaccessible, its UI is daunting, and it is, ultimately, just a new Bethesda game. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a stark reminder that hype trains are just marketing tools in a different font. Starfield is a good game, but it is not a groundbreaking one.
Before I got a chance to dive into Starfield, I wondered aloud (and on social media) if the game would occupy a similar space in my life that Skyrim has held on more than one occasion. Skyrim never floored me and never lingered after I powered off my console, unlike Marvel’s Spider-Man’s version of Manhattan, or story beats in Mass Effect 2. But every time I dropped back into Skyrim, I fell into the same satisfying loop, emerging from a lengthy play session a little dazed, uncertain of the time, blinking to reaccustom my eyes to the real world outside of its pixels.
Every time I jumped into Skyrim I’d go off searching for some tucked-away relic or NPC in need of help and end up climbing to the top of a peak I saw in the distance, or scurrying through caves like a little gamer Gollum, furiously lining my pockets with shiny objects. I’d “just one more side-quest” myself into the wee hours of the morning, surreptitiously pulling tokes from a pre-roll resting on the table in front of me. No matter what I did, whether it was becoming a vampire or participating in a drinking competition, I was never blown away or taken aback by what Skyrim unfurled before me—I was, however, hooked.
I’m about 20 hours into Starfield and can safely say it is exactly like Skyrim in space. The steady serotonin drip of overhearing a conversation, marking the quest associated with that conversation on my map, completing it, then going back to the list and selecting the next thing is unparalleled. It is the kind of game that completionists salivate over, the kind that I find myself longing to return to and get lost in during my workday, on the train home, while finishing off a workout.
After progressing the main campaign a bit, I violently veered into side-quest territory, spending nearly four hours straight on the Blade Runner-esque planet Neon. I joined a gang, I helped Starfield’s version of Björk recover her music, I tried to console a grief-stricken widow in the shadow of a fish corpse. I paid for VIP lounge access at a bar, helped squash a squabble over a robot that had been vandalized, and rented a room in a hotel just to say I did. Starfield has hooked me in a way that only Bethesda games can, because it is so thoroughly a Bethesda game with a shinier coat of paint.
Image: Bethesda
Expectation versus reality
There is nothing wrong with Starfield feeling familiar—Bethesda’s formula works, and has for over two decades, so I’m not crucifying Todd Howard for refusing to reinvent the wheel. I am, however, noting that there’s a clear disconnect between calling a game “one of the most important RPGs ever made” and that game then reusing long-existing RPG gameplay mechanics and storytelling techniques throughout.
As Kotaku’s Zack Zweizen points out, Starfield is “still a Bethesda RPG. You can almost feel the ancient bones of Morrowind and Fallout 3 poking through bits of the scenery and menus as you play.” Companions still linger behind NPCs chatting you up, players are still almost always overencumbered, enemies still fall over like action figures when you send a gust of gravity their way that feels almost exactly like Skyrim’s Dragon Shouts.
There’s nothing groundbreaking about Starfield, save for maybe its scope, which is possible largely because of the technological advances that have taken place within the last several years, and are now readily available in consumer-facing products like the Xbox Series X/S and modern PCs.
But as for Starfield bringing new ideas to the genre, or adding anything new to its well-worn formula…it doesn’t. Bethesda has been quietly moving its own role-playing goalposts closer to the more shallow end ever since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, narrowing the scope of what the player can actually influence, placing you in a world that feels perfectly carved out for you to slot into, its problems cleanly laid out for you to solve. Cian Maher’s quote from an Oblivion piece for TheGamercomes to mind: “I also don’t reckon Skyrim ever managed to carve out a portion of its world and imbue [it] with the necessary narrative significance for a conclusion to not seem like deus ex machina.”
Aside from extensive ship-building mechanics, there aren’t any shiny new gameplay additions in Starfield. Building an outpost is just Fallout base-building, leveling your lockpicking or melee abilities follows similar logic to Skyrim, and there are many eerie similarities to Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds. The most noted difference comes not in an updated role-playing system or deeper NPC interactions, but in gunplay—Starfield improves upon Bethesda’s infamous combat clunkiness, and it’s welcome.
But Starfield feels the same way Fallout 4 did, which felt the same way Skyrim did, and that does not make it “one of the most important RPGs” ever made. It just makes it a good Bethesda game, a game made by a studio that Microsoft spent $7.5 billion to acquire. We’d do well to remember that, both as consumers and critics, going forward.
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I sometimes hide disappointment behind a meek observation that, well, “it isn’t for me,” but I’m sure that Dauntless developer Phoenix Labs’ life sim role-playing gameFae Farm, out on Switch and PC on September 8,is for me. Calm and uncomplicated “cozy gaming” is heavily associated with women, I’m one of those. Fae Farm, in which you play a traveler who’s chosen to travel to a distant island in order to restore it, is washed in fairy magic, and I like that. I love Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park, I spend too much money on my haircuts—I’m just like other girls.
Fae Farm disrespects that, then, by being a duplicate of almost every major life sim game that came before it, acting like all other girls want is copycat farming mechanics and obligatory marriage.
Fae Farm is overly familiar
Seeming to anticipate my irritation, my custom character won’t stop giggling in the, I will say, pleasantly representative creator. I test out a few different skin tones from Fae Farm’s abundant options, and she’s laughing. I weigh the merits of space buns over braids while scanning the hijab and turban styles, and she chuckles unremittingly. Oh my God. I select “Silent” when it’s time to pick a voice. I can already tell this game is going to patronize me.
Not that it needs to. Fae Farm borrows all its important elements from the king of modern cozy gaming, Stardew Valley, and from the genre’s 1997 mothership Harvest Moon, so I’m walking into a recurring dream.
Like in those games, creating and maintaining neglected farmland makes up part of my daily routine, as does interacting with Azoria island (I rename my town and homestead to a body part of my choice, but I can’t edit the island’s name) shopkeepers to buy useful or decorative items, like little glass bottles of health-restoring potions, wallpaper embellished with butterflies, and a peasant dress I routinely reinvent by dying it different colors.
My neighbors offer me both main story quests, all plainly stated in a graphic on the left of my screen, that let me access new parts of Azoria’s map, but I return to them for additional side quests that lead me to new gameplay features, like bastard bunny Cottontail creatures I can buy and bring home to harvest their excess cotton. Island residents also help me acquire and upgrade skills I’ve mastered in other life sims like Disney Dreamlight Valley, Dinkum, and Hello Kitty Island Adventure: fishing, mining, bug-catching, and cooking.
Fae Farm is less coquettish about those things than other games are. They aren’t really “minigames” here, though you can complicate things by strategically holding A to sneak up on a bug instead of impulsively approaching, and fish will tug your line, turning it taut and red, before allowing you to snag them. Most of the time, though, if you see a tiara-topped queen bee and want to document it in your almanac, as long as you swing, it’s guaranteed to end up in your net. If a woozy rainbow starburst, which can signal rarity, instead intrigues you to a brawny fish’s shadow deep underwater, you only have to cast a line, and the fish is likely yours for dinner.
In part, this effortlessness is what makes Fae Farm’s life sim activities appealing. Everyone already knows that real world chores can be hard, and they can feel hard to start. Why not pick up your Switch, leave your mind on the table far away from you, and be instantly full among the ladybugs?
I get it, I like escapism and low-dose edibles, too. But I’m growing skeptical of heirloom cozy game escapism—the fishing, mining, bug-catching, etc. It’s starting to feel pre-chewed and insulting, the expectation that I’ll pay another $60 and put in another 100 hours into a game I’ve already played in a dozen other forms.
I’m extra disappointed, then, that I’m not a fairy, the one Fae Farm aspect I’d hoped would set it apart from the rest of the farming sim milieu. But, while magic helps me clear purple weed tangles, which are identical to Disney Dreamlight’s Night Thorns, no one in town speaks of fairies during my 13-hour playthrough, and I never reach the mainline quest that unlocks fairy wings, which enable double-jump. Their empty slot in my outfit editor taunts me.
I witness, instead, how wild magic has turned stray objects like pocket watches, wagon wheels, and treasure chests into enemies–fanged “jumbles” which snap while I explore the Saltwater Mines, one of three dungeon systems in the game. I whack them with my magic staff and avoid their area-of-effect attacks, the path of which are revealed in the few seconds before they’re executed, to shake out the resources they drop, like raw gems and lumber.
Aside from these jumbles, though, there is rarely any satisfying conflict in this game. I upgrade my tools to more durable copper relatively early on, after acquiring tons of nuggets in the multilevel Mines, where floors don’t permanently unlock until you’ve gotten enough metal to smelt a seal. These seals also unlock fast-travel portals, or wayshrines, located throughout Fae Farm’s map, but I mostly travel by diving into the ocean (an action that, amusingly, refills my watering can) and bouncing on springy, purple mushroom tops.
With my improved copper sickle, I’m able to conserve energy while amassing plant fibers with which to feed my Cottontail, or while I crack open beech tree stumps to craft other homestead decor, some of which can interestingly augment my max health, stamina, or blue mana meter. I hit a glittery rock with one swing, and a cascade of citrine floods my inventory.
Very quickly, stuff starts taking over my Fae Farm life. It’s partially my fault—I can’t help myself from collecting seashells and all kinds of other garbage to sell, eat, or build with. I make it a habit to trek to the central market at least once a day (unlike other sims, there’s no penalty for staying out late; at midnight, you’re teleported to bed like you’ve always been well-behaved), to unload up to 32 items onto a set of tables, at which everything sells overnight.
But even after upgrading my inventory and buying an additional market stall, I feel overburdened (over-padding your backpack doesn’t encumber you in-game, however; only losing a large chunk of health or staying awake past 11 p.m. can make your character sluggish). I’m constantly finding recipes for new furniture, like a stamina-boosting, “relaxing cozy” bed, or a mana-improving, “inspiring cozy” crystal ball. And I unlock crafting stations to form processed materials, like a loom I use to make fabric for clothing. But I run out of space to carry all the materials I need to make them. I get stuck in a loop of collecting items, discovering recipes, but not having enough inventory space to fill them; I then drop some items in order to gather a different, more specific set of items. In the end, I have a wooden fence. I start wondering what’s the point.
Image: Phoenix Labs
What’s the point?
I’ve been considering how the “girl games” I grew up with—things like fairy-sprinkled massively multiplayer online game Pixie Hollow—compare to games from around that time marketed to men, like Dead Space or Guitar Hero. It’s belittling, in hindsight, that shared human experiences like triumph, tears, and “Everlong” by Foo Fighters were implied to be things that only men could really understand, could really relate to in a game. Girls are too simple to accept anything other than Tinkerbell wearing lipgloss, games said then.
But, you know, I like guitars, too. I thought everyone knew that, but I’m realizing, with Fae Farm, that games still see women—now a major demographic—as blank, easily satisfied consumers.
I think the imitative content I already mentioned speaks to that point, but I don’t find any Fae Farm quality as offensive as its allowing you to date and, ultimately, marry one of your empty shell neighbors, all of who repeat generic dialogue when engaged in conversation: “Thanks, I’m glad you were able to clear out those thorns,” “I’m looking forward to planting my spring crops,” “I love watching the blossoming trees in spring.”
With dialogue this unsexy, it feels like Phoenix Labs added dating elements to its game because that’s what you do in a game like Stardew Valley, and that’s what women like.
I’m ready to move on from that. Women aren’t so undemanding, and neither is the cozy game genre in 2023. Other relaxing games, including this year’s Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood and A Space for The Unbound, use soothing genre characteristics, like repetitive actions and hushed music, only to provide a downy pillow at which to explore more complex, more human themes, like gender identity, trauma, and love. And they do it successfully.
I’m over seeing girls’ cuteness being understood as their obedience—to social expectations, to men’s interpretation, whatever—and I don’t need Fae Farm following suit by serving us hollow chocolate bunnies, something easy to eat. Other modern cozy games have already demonstrated that the genre can handle emotional depth, and I prefer that to the worn-out Harvest Moon picnic blanket. We can wrap ourselves in something more prickly, life sims’primarily female audience is certainly capable of complexity. Women like more than flowers and marriage. We contain multitudes. It’s not a big deal.
It can feel good to put the controller down at the end of Armored Core VI, comforted by the knowledge that you survived its most brutal skill check bosses and learned to configure your complex mech for whatever new hazard Rubicon threw your way. It would be a mistake not to pick it back up again though, as Armored Core VI’s new game plus mode is where a great game starts to get even better.
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After you beat the game’s final boss and the credits roll, Armored Core VI brings you back to your mech hanger and presents you with the very first mission all over again. At first it seems like you’re just repeating the entire game, only this time with all of the shotguns, missile launchers, laser swords, and new mech parts you collected during your previous run. But then little changes start to pop up—additional snippets of dialogue, unexpected new choices you can during various missions.
Armored Core VI has “good” and “bad” endings, and a few branching missions along the way, but its new game plus mode is more than just a chance to take the road less traveled. There are entirely new battles and narrative twists that add new depth to the game’s thrilling but barebones story. If you’re playing and enjoying FromSoftware’s latest mech game, do yourself a favor and don’t sleep on its new game plus.
The first wrinkle comes in chapter one’s Attack the Dan Complex sortie. You’re hired by Balamb to join its squad of “Red Gun” jarheads and destroy Rubicon Liberation Front MTs and facility generators. Only this time the rebels radio you halfway through and promise to pay you to double-cross the Red Guns and defend the dam. Adding to the drama is the fact that the fight is legitimately hard, punishingly so if you try to sleepwalk through, and still challenging even if you go in with your best late-game loadouts.
Rokumonsen is one of the many pleasures that awaits you on a new game plus playthrough. Screenshot: FromSoftware / Kotaku
New game plus unlocks additional parts too, as well as more Arena matches to earn the chips needed to fully upgrade your OS Tuning skill tree. A lot of the missions stay exactly the same, but they’re perfect testing grounds for all of the gear you purchased but didn’t play with the first time around. Boss fights like Balteus and the Sea Spider, meanwhile, are incredibly satisfying to rip through with ease in less than 60 seconds. And some of my favorite characters in the entire game didn’t appear until subsequent playthroughs.
Armored Core VI has three endings total, the third and final of which is both the most satisfying from a narrative point of view and the most difficult to achieve, not least of all because it requires beating the game three times. I’m not usually one for toiling through the same levels over and over again with minor changes just to unlock a cutscene. The thematic resonance of “cycle of violence” stories can only take these thinly veiled attempts at padding so far. Armored Core VI’s new game plus mode, like its base game, doesn’t mess around though, and I’ve only fallen more in love with it each new time I’ve beaten it.
In the several hours I’ve played since Starfield’s September 1 Early Access kicked off, I’ve been consistently confused by the menus and user interfaces of Bethesda’s latest RPG. I remain miffed by its starmap, baffled by its inventory, and at a loss when it comes to my ship’s HUD–and don’t even get me started on the shipbuilder, which almost sent me into a tailspin.
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Bethesda games are infamous for their clunky UI. Modders have spent hours upon hours overhauling in-game menus so that they’re more intuitive and easier to navigate. But at least in games like The Elder Scroll V: Skryim, the initial menu is minimalist and straightforward–bring it up with a button press and then select from one of four clearly delineated options (skills, magic, items, and map), then navigate to a more involved menu that breaks down your inventory by type, or sweeps up to show your skill tree in the form of constellations.
Starfield technically follows that design logic, but its NASA-punk stylings and heaps more content make for a navigational nightmare–especially for someone as impatient and clunky as myself.
Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku
Lost in Starfield’s menus
In Starfield, the first thing that pops up when you press the menu button on your Xbox controller is an iteration of Bethesda’s prototypical menu setup, but it’s got so much visual noise that it immediately overwhelms. (It’s important to note that you have to hard press the menu button to get to your basic start screen that includes options to quicksave, load, and change your controller settings, which can be confusing.)
On this screen, there’s a circle and four quadrants. In the center of a circle stands your character in whatever getup you’ve got them in at the moment; their name, level, and health displayed next to them. At the bottom of that circle is the mission you’re currently on/following, but it’s not labeled as such, all you can see is its name and next steps. If you select this, you’ll be taken to all the possible main quests, side quests, and “activities” available to you.
The top-left quadrant outside of that central circle shows your current location, local time, and survey data–selecting this section brings you to the starmap, which we’ll get into later. The top-right quadrant shows one of your skills and how far along you are in that skill’s certification progress–completing that will let you use skill points to advance its level. Selecting this section takes you to your skill tree, one of the more legible parts of Starfield’s menus with five clearly labeled skill sections (physical, social, combat, science, and tech) that are then mucked up by dozens of tiny icons representing each possible selection.
The bottom-left quadrant shows your ship’s information–what class it is, how many crew are on it, the hull’s strength, etc. Selecting that brings you to a truncated version of the nightmarishly complicated ship builder (you can only customize your vessel while docked at certain shipyards), that shows your ship floating on a sort of digital blueprint with measurements displayed along it.
Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku
A crowded display on the left-hand side shows the levels of all six of your ship’s systems (I still don’t know what each abbreviation stands for). Here, you can navigate between each of the ship’s systems, and get a half-dozen data points for each one: from how much “power” your 10S Protector Shield Generator has to the hull damage your Atlatl 270Z Missile Launcher can cause. There are so many numbers and graphs that it triggers the same fight-or-flight response I used to get in high school math class.
The bottom-right quadrant of Starfield’s main in-game menu shows your current weapon and its mass, and selecting it opens up your inventory. There’s no way to quickly swap between weapons during firefights (pressing down on the D-pad lets you access medicine and there appears to be a quick-select wheel here, but I can’t figure out how to assign anything else to this section), so you must return to this inventory menu when you inevitably run out of bullets for your Eon or Grendel.
Frustratingly, though I can easily see what kind of ammo I have in my inventory menu, I can’t tell what fucking ammo goes for what fucking gun, so I’m almost always unsure what weapon to quickly swap to during combat. Hovering over each gun in your inventory brings up–you guessed it–more information, from fire rate to range to accuracy to mods, and rounds, which is tucked away in the top right corner, one of nine different data points.
The lack of a difference in font size or color between the item you have equipped and the item categories can be a little confusing: “Deep Mining Space Helmet Helmets” becomes an oft-repeated refrain as I play. But I run up against the most friction in the starmap menu because it combines Starfield’s crowded UI with my Aries lack of patience, making for a potent cocktail of confusion.
Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku
Starwoman, waiting in the sky
After selecting the starmap from the aforementioned top-left quadrant, you’ll see a view of the planet or space station you’re currently on, with details about the planet on the left side, an option to scan below that, and several button prompts in the bottom right corner: missions, show me, set landing target, and back to system.
Pressing B will zoom you out to a full view of the solar system that houses that planet or space station and all the icons indicating explorable places within that solar system. Press B again and you’ll zoom out to the galaxy–but you have to hold B in order to exit this map screen, a maneuver that isn’t very intuitive and often results in me rapidly zooming in and out of solar systems and galaxies like I just dropped acid.
And the other options, “show me” and “set course” are not very straightforward. What the fuck does “show me” mean? Are you “showing me” where I need to go on this massive (and hard-to-read) map? Sometimes “show me” will snap-cut to a shot of a planet I know I haven’t seen before, but it’s not immediately clear how I’m meant to get there–at least not for me, and as I play Starfield I feel increasingly like my years of marijuana use have finally started doing what my parents always warned me about: making me stupid.
Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku
After I play the opening act and am unceremoniously made the captain of my own spaceship, I spend several minutes cursing under my breath and angrily clacking the Xbox controller’s joysticks around while trying to figure out how to fly to Starfield’s major city, New Atlantis. My partner, normally a patient backseat gamer and apparently a native Bethesda menu speaker, finally snaps after a few minutes of me flying my ship, snail-like, towards another system. “This is intuitive, hover over the spot you want to go, select A, hold X to travel. You aren’t even trying to figure this out,” he says, laughing in disbelief.
He’s not wrong, but also, there’s a lot going on in every corner of my screen, and I’m easily confused! After his somewhat stern advice, it takes me several more trips into space to figure out how to easily select a mission location from the mission menu and view it on my map, and then fast-travel to that point on the map. I’m now at a point where I can get where I need to go, with several ham-handed maneuvers and “oopsies” along the way, but it shouldn’t be this difficult, Starfield. I know flying a spaceship and managing resources and conserving ammo and lightspeed jumping between galaxies and eating space cereal and upgrading weapons and negotiating hostage situations requires a lot of concentration, but I feel like I need a PhD to play this game efficiently.
Starfield is officially out in Early Access for those who got one of several special editions of Bethesda’s long-awaited sci-fi RPG. Though everyone else will have to wait until September 6, several Kotaku staffers decided to shell out for the Early Access editions and spent the first night of launch zipping around space, hoarding junk in their ships, and blowing up pirates. Here’s what we had to say about our first few hours with Starfield.
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Ethan Gach: Starfield has to be the weirdest big new game experience I’ve had this year. I played five hours straight. I would have kept going but a space cowboy’s gotta sleep. At the same time there were so many things that underwhelmed or confused me. How far did everyone get and what was your most memorable moment?
Alyssa Mercante: I am currently trying to track down the VC guy with Sarah. I’m still a bumbling idiot in menus, still struggle to quickly determine how much ammo I have in my weapon, which ammo is for what, how to see the map of an interior space (can you?), and other stuff that’s almost all a mix of weird UI and my impatience.
It’s got the exact kind of grippiness in terms of gameplay loop that I’d expect from Bethesda—I don’t really care about any of this shit yet but I’m sort of lazily plodding on, and mostly enjoying it most of the time.
Levi Winslow: I’m maybe four hours in? I got to New Atlantis, met Sarah and the Constellation gang, then dipped off to Mars and Venus to hunt for Moara. I’m finding some of the systems quite cumbersome and unintuitive. Like, why do I have to bring up the weapon menu to select a different gun or whatever? It’s weird that in other Bethesda games, you can quick-swap between weapons on the fly, but you can’t in Starfield? Unless I missed something, which is totally possible. The game gives you so many tutorials for its menus and systems that a quick-swap could’ve been buried. Still, though, I’m having a blast living life as a space cowgirl. Currently, I’m on the hunt for some legendary ship.
Carolyn Petit: I admit, I only got as far as the door of Constellation’s base before calling it a night, and perhaps it’ll grow on me, but it just felt very dated to me, very much like Bethesda holding on to Bethesda design concepts that, in my opinion, it really doesn’t need to hold onto anymore. For instance, when I arrived in New Atlantis, I immediately walk past this group of people who are just dispensing exposition at each other in the clumsiest way. One character says something really disparaging and messed-up about a certain group of people, and someone else calmly replies, “That’s unfair,” before proceeding to rattle off an entire story about a positive experience he had with them, all while everyone else in the group just looks on. People just don’t talk or interact this way in my opinion, and I felt less like I was in a bustling new city and more like I was in line for a ride at Disneyland where animatronic figures are stiffly filling me in on the ride’s lore.
EG: Yea I didn’t immediately find a way to hot-swap weapons either. Between that and constantly being overloaded with enemy loot and no easy place to go to sell it all, I spent probably a third of my entire session last night just scrolling back and forth over a bunch of weapons (including to see which ones I actually still had ammo for).
My most memorable moment was talking down the initial pirates you run into outside of that first moon and then blowing them up with the literal red barrel behind them. 2010 is soooo back. I do agree Carolyn it feels very stagey in a dated sort of way. The game is constantly reminding you it’s a game, in a way I didn’t get from say, Cyberpunk 2077. It reminds me so much of The Outer Worlds in many ways, which was a much more satirical take on the whole genre.
LW: Just adding to your point about blowing up the first space pirates…
Levi shares a Reddit post showing how one person blew up the barrel behind the pirates before the cutscene could even begin.
CP: I also didn’t love that the game forces you to go do this combat mission so early on, before you even meet Constellation and really get introduced to the game’s core concept. To me, it felt a bit like Bethesda lacking faith in its own concept of this wide-open spacefaring game, as if it felt the need to reassure gamers: Don’t worry, this is still a video game-ass video game in which you get to gun down lots of dudes.
LW: I agree. I barely even listened to those dudes. Knowing what I was getting into, I skipped their dialogue and shot them up. Really, I just wanted some quick loot to sell for even quicker cash, which leads me to one of my biggest gripes with this game: There’s so much shit to collect. I know that’s very Bethesda but wow, the sheer amount of stuff to pick up and pore over in this game is staggering.
CP: That’s one Bethesda-ism I have no problem with. I find it comical and enjoyable. In that research base where you fight the pirates, I saw a little zen garden on someone’s desktop and immediately grabbed it for my own. It’ll be one of the millions of stolen items eventually decorating my ship or my space-house or whatever.
EG: Has anyone tried to do persuasion?
LW: Yeah I tried it on the dude at the bar when looking for Moara. (Jack, I think his name was. Maybe John?) I failed it, but then got Sarah to convince him to lower the price of his info, which worked.
CP: I tried to get out of killing the initial pirate boss with persuasion. I failed, and didn’t fully grasp how it worked. There was a pop-up that said something like “you can’t fail if your previous choice succeeded.” Huh? Anyway, I’m sure I’ll make sense of it in time but it was a little befuddling at first.
AM: I used one of my first skill points for speech, and tried persuasion with the bar guy as well. It worked, but I also did not fully comprehend what I was doing
EG: Yea, there’s a later mission where you are trying to convince a dad alienated from his son to hand over a map and at first it’s like, okay how are we gonna navigate 30 years of emotional baggage and then instead I said something like, you know giving him the map is what so-and-so would have wanted, and bingo. It was so goofy.
Claire Jackson and Zack Zwiezen enter the chat.
Zack Zwiezen: I’ve used persuasion a few times and it’s been helpful. Skipped the pirate boss fight, for example. I’m still learning how it works, but its nice to see Bethesda bringing back some RPG-ish systems like that. Reminds me of the weird Oblivion persuasion minigame! With the weird circle and sliding stuff around. I don’t think I ever got good at that one. This Starfield one seems a bit simpler and I think I mostly get it.
Claire Jackson: Good to know you can skip the pirate boss fight…my attempt at resolving that ended up with me bashing an ax into his face. And I was genuinely trying not to kill anyone. Period!
Maybe it’s just the nature of the game’s opening needing to hold your hand to learn all its complex systems and set you up for the quest, but I was also dismayed that I couldn’t choose to stay on the mining planet. I mean, I touched a weird thing, saw a weird thing, and now some rando is like, “Here take my ship and go talk to this space secret society or whatever, though they won’t have answers for you. Sorry. By the way, you’re a captain now!”
ZZ: It moves pretty fast and I wonder if that was a reaction to how slow Fallout 4‘s intro was and how people didn’t seem to like that.
EG: I was so relieved. No messing around.
ZZ: Agreed. It was nice to just get going. I was worried I’d have to spend four hours in the mine finding a sweet roll for someone.
CJ: I wanted to mess around lol. I wanted to just hang out and mine some stuff. The game wants me to be a hero so badly, and enough games do that for me that I kinda wanted this to unravel itself a bit more slowly.
ZZ: I will say, once you get through with that first big quest and intro stuff, the game truly goes, “Okay, do whatever you want.” At that point you can go be a space miner and never worry about the main story again.
CJ: That’s a relief. So maybe my space gal can be someone who just had one traumatic encounter with space pirates, dropped off some weird who-the-hell-knows-what to these brainiacs, and then just went about her life where she’ll unpack that PTSD-inducing episode after years and years of therapy. That’s all I want. Space therapy.
AM: Within moments of picking up my rock cutter laser I tried to kill someone in the mines, so the intrusive thoughts are already beating my ass.
ZZ: Hot tip: That laser cutter is a very good weapon early on and uses no ammo! It stunlocks people and can even blow up their packs, killing others. Handy! And fun.
EG: Starfield is definitely a resource-extraction fantasy. Mine stuff! Loot stuff! Steal stuff! Use it to do cool things. So far navigating relationships and political factions has really taken a backseat.
ZZ: It was nice to end my time with the first companion, Sarah, and not feel like she wanted to jump my bones. A break from Baldur’s Gate 3, haha. But yeah, it’s clear that certain parts of Starfield got more attention and resources than others.
EG: I found a mysterious map to a pirate hideout or something earlier this morning so that’s cool. The thing keeping me excited to come back at the moment is the fact that it still feels like there are a ton of possibilities lurking out there. Whether that’s actually the case or not, the early game is really good at making you at least feel like you’re barely scratching the surface.
LW: I agree. I’m sure the novelty of Bethesda’s systems will wear thin after a few dozen hours, but the early game has me hooked. Running up to my ship, hopping into the cockpit to blast off into the cosmos, getting into a couple of dogfights with space pirates then looting their ships, landing on a planet to sell my goods before embarking on a bounty—it’s all giving Cowboy Bebop, a fantasy I’ve longed for in video games. It’s not totally there. Some mechanics are still quite unwieldy, but Starfield is letting me live out that bounty hunter lifestyle, and I simply can’t get enough of that right now.
AM: I did get a similar feeling to one I saw Ethan mention on Twitter (X, whatever) before—I woke up excited to play this. For all the jank, for all the confusing menus, there’s enough good stuff here that I am willing to spend more time exploring, lurking, looting, and what have you. How long will this last me? I’m not sure yet. But for now, I’m not all that angry that I’m going into this long weekend with a cold—now I can just sit inside and play Starfield.
Bethesda’s head of publishing Pete Hines posted a boilerplate excuse note on Twitter for any Starfield fan who, ahead of the game’s official release on September 6, is rapidly starting to feel a little bit…feverish.
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Your stomach is twisting into tight knots. Your hands are slick and shaking, your whole body shivers with the exciting prospect of handing a multibillion-dollar company your $70. It’s okay. You’re safe now with Hines, whose name on Twitter currently specifies that he is “(not a doctor).”
“To Whom It May Concern: Please excuse ____ from work/school/chores for the foreseeable future,” begins his magnanimous excuse note. “They are currently undergoing treatment for an infection from [a dinosaur-like Starfield creature] Ashta bite after a recent expedition to [planet] Tau Ceti II.”
Hines’ note isn’t the first time a developer has tried to help you get out of responsibilities in order to play their new game. Ahead of Baldur’s Gate 3’s August 3 release, developer Larian Studios posted a “request for special dispensation” form, and encouraged players to hand it to their boss so they could spend hours upon hours in an expansive RPG world. Starfield, which similarly promises a thousand explorable planets and side quests, seems like another game that might suck up all your free time.
It’s also not the first time Hines has offered gamers a sick note to play his company’s latest game. He shared a much shorter, simpler sick note two days before Fallout 4’s November 10, 2015 release date. “I figure some of you might need a note from your doctor for your upcoming ‘sick day(s)’ this week,” he wrote then. As far as running gags go, it could be worse.
Will this Starfield sick note work? It’s unlikely, but your boss, professor, or mom can judge for themselves if Pete Hines, described on the note as an “MD, LAN, PhD, ARS” and “Head Physician, Constellation,” wants what’s best for you.
“Whether you need time off to play Starfield starting tomorrow in early access,” Hines said on Twitter, “or next week at launch, Uncle Pete has you covered.”
“Already asked my boss earlier this week (and was approved),” said one commenter. “But, man, you should’ve sent this earlier.”
“Literal people are going to use this,” another Twitter respondent said. “Genius.”
Starfield launches in Early Access at 8 p.m. Eastern on August 31.
Call of Duty fans’ passions run hot when it comes to the series’ multiplayer maps, which have been the topic of discussion and controversy since United Offensive, the 2004 expansion pack that added multiplayer to the original Call of Duty. Maps are so integral to the Call of Duty experience, so important to each new game’s success, that favorites often get spruced-up and re-released—the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, for instance, is bringing back every single map from 2009 smash Modern Warfare 2.
Some maps in Call of Duty’s extensive multiplayer offerings are thoroughly mid (Quarry) or downright awful (Piccadilly, honey, I’m sorry), but many CoD maps represent the absolute best in video game level design, with distinct movement lanes, great sightlines, and beautiful visuals. These maps are the GOATs, the standouts, the reminders that the franchise is so popular for a reason, and today I’ve tried to pick the 10 best of the bunch.
A lot of the maps on my list are on the smaller end, as smaller maps tend to highlight the best features of CoD’s multiplayer mechanics and gunplay. And many of them are also “three-lane” maps, which describe setups that offer three different directions for players to take from their spawn points, which are often divided by buildings or obstacles that nearly cut them off from one another, but don’t completely isolate them.
You’ll also find that these maps are all from older Call of Duty games—that’s because I believe more recent titles (like Modern Warfare 2019 and Vanguard) have larger, more visually complicated maps that don’t play to the series’ strengths. CoD is at its best when it’s a little frenetic, a little chaotic, and a ton of fun—and running through maps that have myriad sightlines and far too many directions to get attacked from is only fun in Warzone, not multiplayer.
Ready? Here are the 10 best Call of Duty maps of all time, in no particular order.
In recent years, Ubisoft has struggled to release games on schedule, with some titles like Skull & Bones being delayed over and over. But now, the company has announced something different. Instead of being delayed, it turns out Assassin’s Creed: Mirage will launch a week earlier than previously planned.
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Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is the next entry in the long-running open-world stealth franchise. This time around players will take on the role of Basim Ibn Ishaq, an assassin first seen in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. In Mirage, players will get a chance to see how a younger Basim evolves from a street thief to a fully-fledged assassin. Ubisoft is promising that, unlike recent AC games, Mirage will be a smaller, more stealth-focused action game and less of a super large open-world RPG. That sounds great to me, someone who misses those sleeker, sneakier entries. And what also sounds good to me is that we won’t have to wait as long to get our hands on this Assassin’s Creed prequel.
On August 14, Ubisoft announced that Assassin’s Creed: Mirage will launch across PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC on October 5. The game was initially planned—after a delay in 2022—to be released on October 12. Ubisoft says that the game has now gone gold and will be ready for players a full week earlier than expected.
In an era where big, complicated video games are taking longer and longer to make and delays are becoming more and more common, this is a nice bit of news. Not just for Assassin’s Creed fans, who now get to play the upcoming game a week earlier than planned, but for anyone looking for a sign that perhaps not every big game that is completed and successfully ships has to do so on fire.
Of course that’s assuming Mirage launches in a respectable state and not filled with bizarre glitches, like the originally released version of Assassin’s Creed: Unity back in 2014. Either way, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage is now set to launch on October 5 across Xbox, PlayStation and PC. Perhaps one day Skull & Bones will release, too.
“There was a sense that video games were toys. And Sony is not a toy company.” That’s how a new mini-oral history about PlayStation revolutionizing console gaming begins over at IGN. The words belong to former head of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shawn Layden, and they ring true for anyone who grew up with an NES or SNES.…
HOUSTON—Stressing that all she wanted for the holiday was for her son to be happy, local mom Beverly Higgins reportedly mailed her son Conner a Mother’s Day gift Sunday, according to sources. “Just a little something to show how much I love you on my special day,” read the card, which accompanied a brand-new Nintendo Switch, several pairs of wool socks, and a $25 gift card to Chipotle meant “to thank [him]” for giving her the gift of being his mother. “I was at the mall near the hospital after getting a little operation—don’t worry, I’m fine!—and then saw the GameStop and thought of you. You’ve already done enough just by being born, so don’t you think of getting me anything in return, mister! And if you already did, just return it and keep the money and buy yourself something nice. You deserve it! Mothers often get all the credit for the work we do, but I think you deserve it more for being my sweet, special boy.” At press time, Conner Higgins had reportedly called his mother a “bitch” after the package embarrassed him in front of his roommates.
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In March, an employee at a Massachusetts GameStop leaked on Reddit that Nintendo was probably about to reveal its long rumored special edition Zelda Switch at an upcoming mini-Direct for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Special editions such as these are highly coveted collector’s items, and news of one for the sequel to a best-selling game would be huge for fans looking to buy a new system. This week, GameStop fired the employee who leaked the news, and the employee claims he was told Nintendo helped make it happen.
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Back in March, Mike, who requested Kotaku only use his first name, posted a photo of a GameStop computer screen showing the inventory database had been updated with a secret new Switch model on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit. It was the day before Nintendo’s big extended gameplay reveal for Tears of the Kingdom, and the employee speculated in the post that a special edition Zelda Switch which had already leaked back in December, would be announced during the stream. Mike says he got fired on April 11, about two weeks later.
In a phone interview with Kotaku, Mike said he made the leak because he was a big fan of the franchise and wanted to give others a heads up in case pre-orders went live that day. GameStop in particular has seen issues for buyers when it comes to preorders in the past, though this wasn’t a reason cited by Mike for the leak. On March 28, Nintendo did reveal a special edition Switch, and the following day pre-orders went live at GameStop and other retailers.
At the time, the Reddit post didn’t garner a ton of upvotes, and the now former employee said he didn’t think of it as a big deal since he didn’t technically leak any images or special details about the console itself, and the post itself was mostly speculative. Nintendo also tends to release special consoles such as this one for most of its major releases, such as Pokémon.
Collector’s Editions Are A Big Deal At GameStop
But on April 5, a week later, Mike said the company traced the leak back to them. Coming in for his afternoon shift after watching the new Super Mario Bros. Movie on release day, he said his district manager called him into the backroom for a meeting. Joined by another GameStop supervisor via video conference, the employee said he was asked if he made the post and whether he knew it violated company policy.
Mike said he immediately confessed, but maintained he wasn’t aware it went against the company’s social media policies. The district manager took their keys and placed them on suspension, saying the final punishment could vary between a first-offense write up and termination. It ended up being the latter. And the now former employee thinks Nintendo is to blame.
When their store manager called on April 11 to deliver the bad news, he said the supervisor told them “off the record” that Nintendo had forced the company’s hand, demanding the employee be terminated over the leak. Mike shared the allegation on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit shortly afterwards writing, “Hopefully all of you were able to get your switch pre-orders in as now I will not be able to get mine.”
GameStop and Nintendo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Image: Nintendo
Another employee at the store corroborated Mike’s account to Kotaku, and said they were told by the same store manager in a separate conversation that Nintendo was the catalyst. “He was an amazing worker,” they said of Mike, adding that he was one of the top performers in the area when it came to achieving GameStop’s aggressive sales goals.
Whoever ultimately made the decision to fire them, the leaker would have been easy to discover. Their social media accounts, including Instagram, Twitter, and Twitch, were linked in various ways to their Reddit account, and included several references to their general geographic location, as well as selfies. “I wasn’t really trying to cover my tracks because I didn’t know it would lead to this,” Mike told Kotaku.
As a large-scale retailer staffed mostly by entry-level workers paid terrible hourly rates, GameStop has historically been a hotbed for big gaming leaks, from Assassin’s Creed to Call of Duty. But it’s rare to hear that someone was actually fired in connection with one of the leaks. It’s perhaps less surprising that this one happens to have been in connection with a big Nintendo reveal, however. The Mario maker has been on the warpath against leaks for years, most recently attempting to subpoena Discord for the private data of someone who shared images from the Tears of the Kingdom collector’s edition artbook.
When asked if the former GameStop employee ultimately managed to secure a Zelda Switch pre-order, Mike confirmed he had. “But sadly I won’t be able to afford it anymore due to lack of a job,” he said. Mike added that when his manager had to deliver the bad news over the phone they pointed out what a shame it was: “This is your favorite company and now they hate you.”
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These Stocks Are Moving the Most Today: Credit Suisse, UBS, First Republic, and More
Stock futures were tumbling Monday after the UBS agreement to acquire Credit Suisse and moves by central banks to improve dollar liquidity failed to lift investors’ confidence in the global banking system.
Milan Fashion Week has just wrapped up, and while this is not normally the kind of thing we would be covering on this, a website about anime, reality television and comic books, 2023’s show featured a surprise inclusion: Blizzard’s Diablo series.
Danish label Han Kjøbenhavn had a whole damn line inspired by (and officially licensed by) Diablo, with founder Jannik Wikkelsø Davidsen—who tells NME he played the game “back in the day”—showing off three separate outfits, two of which you can see in this post.
For those about to say in a comic-book-guy voice “nyyahhhh these don’t look like Diablo characters”, or “I will not be wearing these to my local GameStop, thank you”, please know that this is Milan Fashion Week. This is runway shit. This is designers going wild, art in motion, stuff designed for you to look at and feel something, not wonder when you’ll be able to order it on Amazon or get it with the collector’s edition of a game.
Watch the show, play the game If you’re intrigued by the new show starring Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, consider picking up the source. The 2013 survival horror game recently got a full-on remake for the PS5 with The Last of Us Part 1 and now it’s coming to PC as well. You can pre-order the Steam version of the game for 10% off from most Green Man Gaming which is set to release on March 28.
“For me, darkness is beauty. How do you balance those two things? That generates an [entirely] new feeling”, Davidsen told NME. “What we’re creating has a lot of volume and language in the garments we’re working with, so in that sense I’m trying to mirror the journey within Diablo as well as my own journey.”
In terms of things you can wear, Davidsen says Han Kjøbenhavn—who sell a ton of everyday gear like sweaters and tshirts, albeit at premium fashion label prices—will be releasing “something which is more everyday wearable” in the near future.
While The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom is one of the most hotly-anticipated video game sequels of all time, that’s not the only reason it’s notable this week. It is also, sadly, the first Nintendo game to hit the $70 threshold.
While physical copies of the game have previously been available for preorder at places like GameStop for $60, Nintendo’s press release for the game following tonight’s Direct confirms that the cheapest version will be selling for $70. Preorders for the game at that $60 pricepoint suddenly stopped being accepted by retailers on Tuesday night.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: An epic adventure across the land and skies of Hyrule awaits. In this sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you’ll decide your own path through the sprawling landscapes of Hyrule and the mysterious islands floating in the vast skies above. Can you harness the power of Link’s new abilities to fight back against the malevolent forces that threaten the kingdom? In addition to the standard version, which will be available at a suggested retail price of $69.99, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Collector’s Edition will release on launch day at a suggested retail price of $129.99, and includes a physical version of the game, an artbook with concept art, a Steelbook case, an Iconart steel poster and a set of four pin badges.
That would make it the first ever Nintendo game to hit that $70 threshold, at least as a recommended retail price, which is a bummer for us as consumers (since wages aren’t increasing in line with the inflated cost of…everything) but also expected from a business (because all their costs have gone up). This is why it’s called an inflation crisis, baby!
Back in November, Nintendo responded to Sony’s decision to increase the price of the PS5 by saying “it won’t take such actions at this moment, but will continue monitoring situation and carefully consider (whether we need to take the option).”
While that Switch hardware increase hasn’t materialised—yet—maybe recouping an extra $10 per copy of a game expected to sell millions will help Nintendo’s bottom line, especially since the company just saw its share prices tumble after analysts predicted the aging Switch is “rushing to end of its lifecycle at a faster-than-expected pace,” and that without news of replacement hardware on the horizon things might just get worse.
A video game store called Gameco, in Joplin, Missouri, was absolutely trashed over the weekend when a car drove straight through the front wall and ploughed through several shelves of stock, tyres screeching the whole time.
Pocketoidand CRTpixels’ Jordan Starkweather shared some video of the crash—it’s his local games store— on Saturday, which you can see below in a video which is best watched with the sound on:
As Starkweather explains on Twitter, the driver was “the grandparent of the person who dodged out of the way” in the video (you can see a man on the left of the screen step aside moments before being hit), and appears to have been parked out front and accidentally reversed into the store—which was open and trading at the time—instead of driving away from it.
Having spoken with the lady behind the wheel, Gameco staff say she told them “the throttle was stuck”, and that “she had to slam it in drive to get it to stop going backwards or she would have went thru the entire building”. They also say that while she was “very shaken up and embarrassed”, they told her “no one was hurt and that’s all that [mattered]. Everything else can be replaced. Lives cant.’
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It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
The cases driven through were mostly the store’s 3DO and PS1 collection—this is an independent games store trading in loads of cool retro stuff, not a GameStop—though thankfully most of the games themselves were in storage out the back, with only the cases damaged.
Incredibly, this is the second time this has happened to the store, with the first instance coming at their old location. A photo taken after crash shows that aside from a broken rear window the car is in surprisingly good shape. Better shape than the Xbox cases crushed under its wheels, anyway.
While this would be devastating news for any local retailer—doubly so since this is the second time it’s happened—the Gameco staff at least appear to be taking it in their stride, posting on Facebook “Alright guys we get it, you want a GAMECO Drive-thru!”.
The store will be closed until repairs can be completed, but once they’re done, you can check them out here.
Oh yeah? Then why, when Kotaku called several brick-and-mortar stores just a few days before Christmas this year were we told inventory for both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles was either very limited or completely gone?
The truth of the matter is, while it has become somewhat easier to get your hands on new-gen consoles, doing so still requires diligence and patience—unless you want the smaller, cuter Series S, or can wait for shipping. Otherwise, much like last year, if you were hoping to walk in and out of a store with a brand-spanking-new console in hand, you’re likely out of luck.
Inventory In Brick-And-Mortar Stores Is Unreliable
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You might be tempted to call up your local physical retailer like Best Buy or GameStop with the goal of buying a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X in the store. That’s certainly a possibility, though it depends on the console you’re going for.
A GameStop associate at a Manhattan, New York location told Kotaku over the phone that Sony’s system is “rarely” in stock and when it is on the store shelves, it’s gone within the week. The Xbox Series X is “a little more common,” the associate said, but the same inventory issue arises: When it is available, it’s sold out in just a few days’ time. This situation is repeated at other physical stores, including Best Buy and Walmart, with store associates at both retailers telling Kotaku in brief phone interviews that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are “occasionally” in stock but quickly sell out.
Surprisingly, things are a little different at Target. An employee at a Manhattan store said that the PlayStation 5 was actually sitting on the shelves “right now,” but folks looking to buy one couldn’t just walk in, take one to the counter, and check out. Instead, you have to do an in-store pick-up through the company’s website and, if inventory was available, then you could walk in with money and walk out with a PlayStation 5. In an eye-popping twist, the Xbox Series X was immediately available. The employee said, if I really wanted to, I could go buy Microsoft’s console this instant. They were quick to point out, though, that all system purchases—especially on the PlayStation 5—were limited to one per person due to “security concerns.” Yikes.
Online Retailers Are A Bit Better, But Not By Much
If brick-and-mortar stores are unreliable in terms of physical inventory, you may have a better chance at buying a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X online and shipping it to your home. All the major retailers typically have both consoles in stock and if they aren’t available by themselves, you can usually get it bundled with a game or subscription. There are some exceptions here, of course. GameStop, for example, is completely sold out of individualPlayStation 5s and Xbox Series Xs online right now. As is Best Buy on the PlayStation 5, though you can order the Xbox Series X if you have an account.
It’s always finicky ordering something from Walmart, as the company tends to partner with third-party sellers to complete transactions. But, as I’m checking the company’s website right now, PlayStation 5s and Xbox Series Xs are mostly available to purchase online—though the prices for these consoles seem to vary wildly. Target is similarly strange, withbothsystems either being “discontinued for shipping” or relegated to in-store pick-up only—if they are even available at all, of course. One quick note here, though: You could also order the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X directly from Sony and Microsoft’s official websites, and they appear to be in stock. Shipping here seems to be comparable to other major retailers as well, with orders placed now arriving just a few days after Christmas. Not bad.
Hey, You Could Always Just Get An Xbox Series S
It’s just so cute, even when zoomed in.Image: Microsoft
You may have noticed I skipped one whole console: the Xbox Series S. That’s because, as I wrote earlier, Microsoft’s cheaper, smaller system is almost always available. Several associates across the brick-and-mortar stores told Kotaku over the phone that they had “plenty” of Xbox Series S’s sitting on their shelves at the moment. And while I was browsing around multiple online retailers, including Microsoft’s own website, the slimmer sister to the behemoth shoebox Xbox Series X was ready to be ordered.
Sure, it’s not the monster powerhouse that is the Xbox Series X. It can’t output native “true 4K” and only has four teraflops of processing power when compared to the bigger sister’s 12. And yeah, you do only get 512 GB of internal storage instead of 1 TB. But what the system lacks in power is made up by its impressive form factor and accessible price point. If you’re willing to make those minor trade-offs, then the Xbox Series S is an excellent way to get into this current generation of console gaming.
Another year is in the books, y’all. We made it through. The entertainment and technology industries are still getting battered by both the ongoing pandemic and semiconductor shortages, but it does appear that things are smoothing over a little. Maybe this time next year, the forecast of getting a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X will be significantly better. At the very least, we don’t have to worry much about bots anymore.
