Cyberpunk 2077 players have discovered a new arcade cab hidden in an abandoned church just outside Night City. This new arcade machine, added as part of Cyberpunk 2077’s free 2.0 update, lets you play a Doom-like retro shooter starring Keanu Reeves’ character, Johnny Silverhand.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC Probably Won’t Change V’s Fate
Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.0 update and its massive Phantom Liberty expansion have added a lot of new content and features to the already-huge first-person RPG. But who cares about that stuff? (Editor’s note: A lot of people, actually.) Personally, I’m more excited to see that even in the horrible dystopian future of Cyberpunk 2077 people are still making and playing Doom clones. Some things never change, I guess.
To play this new arcade machine, you’ll need to go into the badlands outside Night City and head south to find a lone, abandoned church just north of a protein farm, which is also a fast-travel point. So if you’ve already unlocked the farm for fast travel, feel free to zip over to save yourself a drive into the badlands.
Regardless of how you get there, enter the church, and on the right you’ll find an Arasaka Tower 3D playable arcade machine.
Arasaka Tower 3D is very clearly an homage to classic id Software shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. You play long-dead rockerboy Johnny Silverhand fresh off his historic bombing of one of the world’s most powerful megacorps’ headquarters as he tries to escape the tower, blasting numerous guards as he ambles—surprisingly slowly—toward freedom. Aside from the lack of speed the gameplay looks surprisingly retro, including the fact that you can’t look up or down, as was the case in many classic ‘90s shooters. The full game is about 10 minutes long or so and includes five levels complete with secret doors.
Do you think people in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe have modded Arasaka Tower 3D to death and got it running on ATMs and other weird devices, like how Doom is playable on just about anything in our world today? I hope so. I hope some nerds have made it fully open-source at this point and created whole new levels for it, too.
I guess once you’re done playing Araska Tower 3D you can go and play the rest of Cyberpunk 2077, including the new expansion. I hear it’s like Doom but you can look up and down now. Wild stuff!
Today, we mourn the loss of something great. A quiet little spot in the middle of a big galaxy. A puddle that simply wanted to help you and was always there, ready to provide. And now, following Bethesda’s latest Starfieldpatch, it’s gone. Gone, but not forgotten.
The Week In Games: What’s Coming Out Beyond Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
Shortly after the release of Bethesda’s massive space RPG Starfield, players discovered an exploit that had appeared in previous games developed by the studio was alive and well in this newest one. In Akila City, in the middle of a dirt road, was a small puddle of mud. And if you got close to this puddle, and gave it a moment of your time, it would provide you with the entire inventory of a nearby shop thanks to a “merchant chest” that was buried underground there…but not buried deeply enough.
This small, humble puddle provided many players, myself included, with stacks of free-to-grab ammo, credits, and other valuable items that could then be resold to other vendors or hoarded for later use. After a few days, the puddle would refill its items, never stopping you from getting what you needed. A hero unlike any other.
I’ll never forget that magic mud puddle. It provided me with so many guns that I sold to a nearby vendor for extra credits. Countless aliens and pirates across hundreds of planets lay dead and rotting thanks to the ammo provided by that once-glorious magic mud puddle. I made a habit of always visiting the puddle to grab some gifts and say hello to it whenever in Akila City. It was nice. In a universe so cold and filled with death, the puddle—my puddle—stood out. A constant. A beacon of hope. Something everybody could rely on, no matter what.
Now I fear what I’ll find the next time I land on that dirtball. Instead of some mud-covered hope buried in a friendly puddle, I’ll find the empty corpse of a friend, of someone who never let me down, murdered by a software update. Rest in peace, Magic Puddle. You were too good to last forever in such a cruel world.
Although early reviews claimed Starfield was Bethesda Game Studios’ most polished game to date, the open-space RPG still suffers from some of the strange, sometimes amusing, occasionally very helpful sorts of bugs and glitches the studio’s work is often known for. Maybe the most mind-boggling bug yet, however, is one that sees players being followed across space, not just by asteroids and other such objects, but even by forests and whole-ass cities.
Out now for Windows PC and Xbox consoles, Starfield is a game about exploring the farthest reaches of the black sea above us. You’ll join a troupe of space surveyors—as well as several other major and minor factions—to scour the cosmos looking for knowledge, loot, and power. Some helpful if annoying companions can accompany you on the voyage, which is nice. Traveling space can be lonely sometimes. But depending on how busted Starfield decides to be during your playthrough, you may find yourself yearning for that loneliness.
Stalkers are lurking in Starfield’s space
Across the game’s subreddit are posts from folks claiming that the most random of space objects are stalking them throughout the galaxy. On September 15, for example, redditor ReverendRoo posted nine images of an asteroid that had followed them “for the past 30 hours” like a pet. Similarly, on September 20, user Ultimastar shared four images on r/Starfield of an asteroid that “randomly attended my wedding” after 100 hours of gameplay. User Royal_Schedule4209 took to Reddit on September 22 to share an image of “a whole forest” that’s somehow been trailing their spaceship. Probably the wildest example of the bug, however, was shared on September 21 by redditor Punidue, who posted an image of “the whole New Atlantis” city creeping on them in space. Yikes.
That’s not all the things that’ve been breathing down the fuel tanks of Starfield players. One redditor claimed to have been followed by a part of a cave, while a separate commenter on user Xthekilr0y’s post about the asteroid following bug said they’re being chased by four pet rocks after mining asteroids. According to a few comments I’ve seen across multiple posts, the bug is seemingly permanent even if you reboot the game. The only way to get rid of them, at least for right now, is to either use console commands on PC or load a previous save. Regardless, this might be the most difficult dogfight you’ll ever find yourself in.
Kotaku reached out to Bethesda Games Studios for comment.
The world is big, but space is bigger. It’s nice having friends to help the years spent gravjumping from system to system speed by. I’m just not sure these space objects are the besties we want hopping galaxies with us. They’re all sus.
Vendors are a crucial component of Starfield, as you’ll need to make use of the RPG’s merchants in order to get better gear, obtain necessary parts to fix a damaged ship, buy healing items, and sell off all your contraband to earn enough credits to eventually buy that house in Akila City. The bars and restaurants in Starfield are also vendors, as the items you can buy from there are considered “aid” in that they’ll restore a little health or give you temporary buffs.
But we don’t just go into Starfield’s bars and restaurants to make use of their functionality—we go there to hang out. Video game bars are fantastic little lore dumps, lovingly detailed spaces that really make the game world in which they’re set feel lived-in and real. There’s nothing quite like walking into Mass Effect2’s Afterlife for the first time, or settling down for a game of Gwent in The Witcher 3’s Golden Sturgeon, to make it feel like you really are your character, and you really are jonesing for a drink.
And like other Bethesda RPGs, Starfield has its fair share of watering holes decorated with interesting objects and frequented by colorful characters (you could even call it Barfield, there’s so many). We ranked all the ones we could find, from worst to best, based on decor, menu, and overall vibes. Which Starfield bar would we most like to drink at? Read on to find out.
There’s been a lot of attention given to Baldur’s Gate 3’s sex, sexiness, and sexuality since it launched in August. Larian Studios’ Dungeons & Dragons RPG has received both high praise and some criticism for its party of adventurers doing the horizontal tango. It’s received acclaim for its lack of restriction and focus on player expression, as well as accusations that you have to beat some of these characters away with a stick lest they start humping your leg.
But wherever you fall on that spectrum, sex is an important part of Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s an extension of your character’s identity, relationships, and personality. Choosing to engage in various sexual escapades is just as much a part of your story as only experiencing it with one partner through its 100+ hours. We talked with Larian Studios about why sex is a big part of Baldur’s Gate 3, and the lengths it went to ensure its intimate scenes were of the same quality as the rest of the stellar GOTY contender.
The difference between a “game with sex in it” and a “sex game”
Sex in games can be a marketing bullet point, a source of controversy, or feel like a “reward” for completing a quest, but when you have a game built on relationships and choice, sex isn’t just sex. It’s an expression of love, companionship, lust, or an extension of world-building as fantasy elements factor into how people are intimate with one another. For Larian, putting so much sex in their game required a balancing act to decide how best to portray sexual conquest in the context of its world and represent the specific characters taking part.
Jason Latino, the cinematic director behind the RPG, told Kotaku the studio used prestige television as a point of reference, especially shows that contain sex, but don’t centralize it so much that it becomes the sole conversation point.
“A lot of it was talking to Swen [Vincke, Director] and pointing at cable television and streaming references,” Latino said. “American Gods was an oft-repeated touchstone, and there were articles about how that production was trying to push boundaries for sexual content in American television. This defined the tonal boundaries. After this, deciding on what felt right from an interactivity standpoint was the next big milestone. We wanted Baldur’s Gate 3 to be a ‘game with sex in it’ without becoming a ‘sex game.’”
And Latino, who was brought onto the team in 2019, said it was a personal mission to ensure the sex scenes lived up to the rest of the game’s quality standards.
“From the production side of things, Larian has been making RPGs for a while and romance has already been a component of how to make our characters feel three-dimensional on past projects,” he said. “As I was hired to introduce cinematics into that approach, I never wanted to be ‘the guy that made Larian games smaller,’ and had to look at every piece of what the studio had achieved in the past and ensure that cinematics were additive and not subtractive.”
Screenshot: Larian Studios / Sam Greer
But intimacy in Baldur’s Gate 3 goes beyond the conventional ways people have sex. This is a magical world made up of magical people, so it makes sense that sex would be a bit unorthodox. The first sex scene I saw was between my Warlock main character and Gale, The Wizard. Gale believes his life forfeit and his time is limited, and wanted to give me a “perfect” night in his study in Waterdeep. He conjures the room, adorned with books, fancy art, and a magical self-playing piano, with the sun shining over the sea beneath the balcony. Then, he astral projects both of our spirits into a space-like realm, where our souls intertwine with one another. Gale copies himself until my character and the Wizard are essentially having a floating, spinning foursome in a void. It’s intense and expresses a raw, melancholy desperation of Gale’s mindset, but it’s also magical and ethereal.
The scene already looks like it took a chunk of Baldur’s Gate 3’s cinematic budget, but according to Latino, it was scaled back from the team’s original vision to adapt for the technical lift.
“I think it started as constellations shifting to take on the forms of Gale’s descriptions, which was a really cool concept, but in practice would have been extraordinarily difficult to pull off,” Latino said. “From that point we started thinking about it in terms of astral projections, a visual treatment we’d already achieved in the engine already—which then led to us asking how do these projections make love.”
Screenshot: Larian Studios / Kotaku
In this scene, Gale and the player’s spirits are interwoven in a way that is, well, magical. Gale’s multiple forms envelop the avatar, moving on the surface of their skin and also through them, all while suspended in the air. It creates a distinct visual motif not found in other romances that captures the connection between the two characters while feeling distinctly not of this world.
“We wanted to explore meditative and geometric poses as a starting point and iterate from there. Many drawings and animations later we started experimenting with compositions inside our cinematic toolset. I think this is where we developed some of the afterimage-like movements and the multiple limbs. We wanted this to feel like Gale and their partner were really merging into one, new, perfectly harmonious being. It was an intuitive process of different artists escalating one another’s’ ideas.”
Bringing magic to where the magic happens
Gale’s not the only character whose sex scene references Dungeons & Dragons lore. Much to the internet’s delight and dismay, the Druid Halsin can shapeshift into a bear, and Karlach, the Tiefling Barbarian, has side quests tied to cooling the infernal engine in her chest before she can do the deed, lest she burn her partner alive. For Larian, crafting these scenes and using them sparingly, as opposed to every pursuit ending in some magical climax, was a team effort, and writers relied on each other to check them if things got out of hand. According to Associate Lead Writer Chrystal Ding, they wanted to create scenes they hadn’t seen in games before, but the team’s collaborative nature kept everyone grounded, even when writing Druid sex.
“Sometimes it’s clear what scene you’re going to need, and sometimes, it’s having the space to let your imagination do the driving,” Ding said. “We’d always rather let the writers go nuts and reign things in later than try to censor at the outset, and we’re fortunate that the iterative way we work gives us that space to try things out. You can usually tell pretty quickly when you show a draft of a scene to your colleagues whether it’s good-weird or too-much-weird by their reaction, and that’s a really important litmus test of whether an idea is worth pursuing or not.”
The uniqueness of all of the characters was both a challenge and an exciting prospect when it came to writing sex scenes for each potential relationship. Where some RPGs tend to operate on a template of when and how your character might do the nasty, such as the original Mass Effect’s sex scenes almost all taking place just before the final mission, Larian Studios wanted Baldur’s Gate 3’s sex scenes to be unique for each character, and not held to any specific timing or format in the relationship. You can have a romp with Astarion early on in the game’s first act, where some relationships like Shadowheart’s are more of a slow burn.
“If you’re going to conceive of any romantic encounter with these characters, you’re going to try to focus on what makes them unique,” Latino said. “Then it’s up to the [artists] to make sure it feels like a natural progression of the drama, rather than coming off as a gimmick.”
This asymmetry means that not everyone’s sex scenes are equally explicit. Scenes like Minthara’s or Halsin’s show much more than say, Shadowheart’s or Wyll’s, as some of the characters “just want to share a glass of wine or simply be held,” according to Latino . Gale, for example, has two possible sex scenes. One can be the aforementioned astral projection scene, or, if the player insists they don’t need the spectacle, they will simply kiss on a conjured bed, then the scene fades to black.
“We did our best to follow the drama,” he said. “Gale [has a magical means]of love making if the player [desires] spectacle, nuance, and space to ease into the magical imagery. Choosing the non-magical route, there’s not a lot of drama to that. Making just a normal romance scene on the bed with Gale for the sake of [parity] didn’t sit quite right with me, it felt gratuitous.”
Screenshot: Larian Studios / James Whitbrook
To Latino, having different scenes, even if some were more or less safe for work, is part of what makes Baldur’s Gate 3 stand out against contemporaries that just model swap different love interests for similar scenes. Plus, it keeps the player from thinking they know exactly what’s coming as a relationship unfolds.
“I’m proud of the amount of romance we offer as well as the variety,” he said. “The asymmetry is part of that, too. Games tend to templatize in order to protect from scope creep and after the pattern recognition of the player kicks in, it all feels a bit prepackaged or less special sometimes. We never wanted people to feel like ‘oh, a cutscene started, I can put my controller down,’ which I think we achieved through asymmetry. The player never knows what’s going to happen when they click on an NPC or one of their companions. It feels more alive this way.”
As for what didn’t make it into the game, Latino said the team’s iterative process meant that most ideas for romance scenes are inBaldur’s Gate 3 in one form or another, as the team would have rather changed something than cut it out entirely if it could elevate a love story. He also said every romance scene was “executed as intended” in the final game. So scenes like the one with the druid sex workers in a Baldur’s Gate brothel, which is portrayed solely through narration over a black screen, is exactly how the team envisioned it.
“Honestly, we adapt and transform ideas until they work more often than not,” he said. “It’s all about iteration and doing justice to the characters and the player’s journey with those characters. If something was cut, it would have been before it reached the cinematic team, which often means writing decided it wasn’t the right fit for the story.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 makes sex special for everyone
Writing and animating sex scenes for different romance routes is one thing, accounting for the myriad of created characters these scenes had to fit was a whole other beast of. The RPG’s character creator lets you make a hero from one of 11 different races, each with different body types and heights. The game ran into some trouble with this early on, with some animations not accounting for short races like a dwarf (the issue’s since been patched), but as far as the actual sex scenes go, Larian’s animation team was operating on the assumption that every romance would be pursued by characters as small as a Halfling and as large as a Dragonborn.
This was a major challenge for the performance capture team, which, on top of voice acting, worked in a mo-cap studio to help the team animate scenes. According to Performance Director Greg Lidstone, intimate scenes came later in motion capture sessions so everyone had a better understanding of the process before diving into the romance stuff. And each scene had to be mo-capped twice to account for whether or not the player would be playing a tall or short character.
Screenshot: Larian Studios / Kale Ryder
“Obviously, we knew the height of the partner, so we always had to play it relative to Astarion, Karlach or whoever was required,” Lidstone said. “Sometimes complicated physical movement would be given to the companion as we knew their height, but we had to make sure the player was an equal participant, so it comes down to adjusting contact points and camera placement.”
While the choreography could be elaborate, it turns out that mo-capping and animating a sex scene in and of itself isn’t the hardest part of portraying intimacy in Baldur’s Gate 3. Even when they’re taller or shorter, most characters have the same broad form to work with and animate around—AKA, their parts are in the same spots. According to Lidstone, the hardest thing about animating romantic encounters is far more PG.
“Kissing was actually the most difficult, in my opinion, as we had to consider snouts, horns and beards as well as height,” he said. “I think for a lot of people, that first kiss is key. It’s the culmination of the relationship and would cheapen the player experience to cut away from it. The player has invested time and emotion to get here and they want that payoff to their commitment, and we certainly didn’t want to let them down.”
Screenshot: Larian Studios / Ty Galiz-Rowe
With all these factors involved, it might have been easier for Larian to restrict your romance options, but Baldur’s Gate 3 lets you pursue anyone as anyone. For Larian, this was an extension of the expressive freedom of its character creator, and said the additional work it took to accommodate for different player identities was “energy well spent,” according to Latino.
“The promise of our character creator is more than just picking a class and appearance, it’s also a way for the player to tell us what kind of adventure they want to have,” Lidstone said. “While we want that experience to be flavored by those decisions, we never want them to feel like they made a bad decision or that their choices shut them out of anything. It’s really as simple as that.”
How intimacy coordinators helped elevate sex in Baldur’s Gate 3
Because Baldur’s Gate 3’s sex scenes are as elaborate as they are, Larian brought in intimacy coordinators to help with the process. Intimacy coordinators act as a coach between the development team and the actors to ensure everyone is comfortable and communicating while shooting intimate scenes. This line of work is commonplace in movies and television, and is gaining traction in gaming—Half Mermaid Productions used an intimacy coordinator for the 2022 mystery game Immortality.
According to Lidstone, conversations about bringing on intimacy coordinators began as it became clear how off-the-wall some of the romance scenes would be. While it was a new experience both for the team and for the coordinators, Lidstone said the coordinators provided insight he and his team needed to create the most comfortable environment for everyone involved. This included talking to actors to build rapport and trust and to discuss boundaries, as well as suggestions for “complicated blocking” on the set.
“I certainly hope to keep my mocap volume a safe and joyful space to work, but when dealing with heightened emotions and sexuality it’s a definite benefit to have a person trained to ensure the actors and the rest of the team have support,” Lidstone said. “Everyone has their own relationship to sex and sexuality and for us, it just made sense to keep everyone emotionally and physically safe while recording.”
Lidstone hopes more dev teams will use intimacy coordinators in the future.
“Over the last few years, attitudes toward sex have evolved and intimacy coordination as a specialty is a reflection of that shift,” Lidstone said. “Games have been exploring romance and sexuality for a while now and it’s wonderful to have new tools and support to navigate this space. Actors do their best work when they feel comfortable and it’s just right for us to meet those needs.”
Screenshot: Larian Studios / Kotaku
Baldur’s Gate 3’s intimacy coordinators helped create accommodations for a particularly challenging sex scene: the one with Haarlep, the devil Raphael’s incubus, which can occur near the end of the game. The encounter between the player and the shapeshifter has the incubus take the form of Raphael himself, or, if the player wishes, a feminine version of him, and climbing on top and gyrating on them as they lie on their back in one of the most straightforward sex scenes in the whole game.
“It’s very physical and probably closest to a traditional live-action sex scene and required the most discussion beforehand,” Lidstone said. “We ensured the set was closed, that everyone understood what the goals were, and that we all felt comfortable with what we were doing.”
Meanwhile, some of the sillier moments, such as the Halsin bear scene, weren’t quite as intense for the actors, even as ridiculous as the moment is on paper.
“The bear scene is an interesting one as in its final form it is pretty surprising, but on set it’s not a very extreme set of moves for the actors,” Lidstone said. “There were certainly raised eyebrows, but everyone on set was extremely professional and leaned into the absurdity of the moment.”
While some scenes like the Incubus are grounded in a very literal perception of sex, some magical things are too other-wordly to do on a motion capture stage. In Gale’s astral projection scene, all of the points where he and his paramour were floating in the air were keyframed. As talented as Baldur’s Gate 3’s actors are, they can’t split themselves into copies of themselves and grow multiple limbs.
“We didn’t do any wire work or anything to approximate those zero-gravity moments, it was just good old-fashioned animation,” Latino said. “When you get actors on a set, you want to be sure you’re going to use all that data. But with the projection sequence we knew it would be a very iterative process, so we approached it as an exploration of poses, layering in motion where needed and throwing out bits that didn’t work.”
Sex is there if you want it, but can be hidden if you don’t
Between bear sex, astral projection sex, burning engine sex, and every other variation, Baldur’s Gate 3’s approach to intimacy is more explicit than most AAA games get. Because of this, the team at Larian wanted to to give players the chance to adjust the experience if they weren’t feeling up to seeing it. This extends to the character customization screens and if you take off your character’s underwear in the game world.
“Ratings boards are very clear about their guidelines, so there was never a fear of accidentally crossing any boundaries with them,” Latino said. “We also took steps to add content features where nudity could be hidden and sexual content could be skipped so this allowed us to trust that our players would make the right decisions for themselves about what they wanted from our M-rated game. For me there wasn’t much stress or hesitation about it.”
The only time ratings boards became an issue was during Baldur’s Gate 3’s early access period, which only included one full-blown sex scene in the form of Minthara. It’s one of the most explicit in the game, and that was done on purpose—it had to broadly represent the kinds of scenes players could expect in the final game.
“The stress I did experience was getting the first romance scene out for ratings because we were in the middle of our push to release Early Access,” Latino said. “I wanted more time to experiment artistically but we needed to make a scene for submission that would be representative of our portrayal of sexual content in the final version of the game.”
Screenshot: Larian Studios / Kotaku
All the extra work has made sex in Baldur’s Gate 3 one of the biggest discussion points surrounding an expansive, often overwhelming RPG. Whether it involves Druids transforming into animals or a Wizard wrapping himself around your soul, Baldur’s Gate 3’s sex scenes manage to capture a grounded humanity in how people connect. Yes, sex can form a deep connection, but it can also be silly, awkward, and transient. You can argue the tadpole-infected camp is full of a bunch of overly-horny weirdos, but even when the approval mechanics undermine them, they’re all just trying to get by, and most of them would like to do that with someone by their side and in their bed. Or, you know, floating in an ethereal void.
This week brought us a wonderful treasure trove of leaks from deep inside the highest echelons of Microsoft’s Xbox division, accidentally shared online as a result of the company’s legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission over its now-greenlit Activision acquisition. These confidential emails, slides, and images of potential new products from the Xbox manufacturer reveal the inner workings of Microsoft’s gaming division, as well as whispers of some possible new games from Bethesda.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
The leaks happened courtesy of Microsoft itself, as it provided these sensitive documents to the court via a publicly accessible link. Yesterday Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer reacted to the leaks, saying that it “was hard to see our team’s work shared in this way.”
“At some point,” Spencer wrote, “getting Nintendo would be a career moment.” He speculated that the Japanese games giant could become more open to acquisition offers in the future due to changing pressures on its board of directors. “It’s just taking a long time for Nintendo to realize that their future exists off of their own hardware,” he wrote. “A long time… 🙂
The emails also reveal that Microsoft thought about purchasing Valve and Warner Bros. Games.
Bethesda might be working on an Oblivion remaster
Because I decided to flip my Xbox 360 from vertical to horizontal while it was running Oblivion, my adventuring in Tamriel was cut short via a huge circular scratch on the disc that no amount of toothpaste could remedy. Maybe I’ll get another chance; while it’s still up in the air, the 2006 Elder Scrolls adventure might get a fancy new remaster in which I could make up for those lost years.
Bethesda’s roadmap was among the many recently released Xbox documents. It includes a sequel to Ghostwire: Tokyo, a Dishonored 3, and remasters of Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Also, don’t expect The Elder Scrolls VI for quite a while.
Spencer: AAA game publishers lost their mojo
Phil Spencer stated that “AAA publishers were slow to react to [the disruption]” of digital storefronts like Steam and the shops built into Xbox and PlayStation.
In a leaked email, Spencer wrote that third-party publishers were unable to replicate the “dominance” they established back in the days of video game retail. After losing their advantage of highly exclusive access to consumers in brick and mortar stores, they “have not found a way to effectively cross promote, they have not found a way to build publisher brands that drive consumer affinity (the way Disney has in video).”
He noted that instead they’ve adopted a strategy of making huge bets on highly expensive prestige projects, relying on those risky, all-in bets to establish and maintain publisher brands. He concluded that “the role of a AAA publisher has changed and become less important in today’s gaming industry.”
Microsoft expected a Red Dead Redemption 2 next-gen refresh
The Xbox Series X and Series S consoles hit the market in 2020. Since then, the lower-powered, disc-less Series S actually makes up the majority of units sold. As of April 2022, 74.8 percent of Xbox Series owners were gaming on a Series S, suggesting just a quarter of the base left gaming on the more-powerful Xbox Series X unit.
Microsoft dramatically underestimated Baldur’s Gate 3
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a super good time. But Microsoft didn’t seem to think the D&D RPG would amount to much. In leaked comments, Microsoft estimated a $5 million expense to get the game on Game Pass, justifying the low monetary amount by describing Baldur’s Gate 3 as a “second-run Stadia PC RPG.”
Reacting to this statement, Larian’s director of publishing noted that Microsoft was far from alone in underestimating the appeal of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Phil Spencer wasn’t impressed by PS5 reveal
In an email to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Phil Spencer described the Xbox Series X/S line as a “better product than [what] Sony has, not just on hardware but equally important on the software platform and services.” He continued, “we have the ingredients of a winning plan […] today was a good day for us.”
Microsoft accidentally got an ‘exclusive’ Sega game
As the next-gen consoles launched in 2020 fans of Sega’s long-running Yakuza series were surprised that its latest entry, the RPG Like a Dragon, was available on Xbox Series X/S but not PlayStation 5. The Yakuza series had long been associated with PlayStation; what was up?
Yesterday’s leak revealed that Microsoft was just as surprised, and it turns out the reason for Like a Dragon landing on Xbox first was due to two competing regional exclusivity agreements Sega made essentially short-circuited each other. The result? Xbox players ate well while PlayStation fans wept into their DualSenses.
The Xbox Series X might go all-digital in 2024
We didn’t just get scans of emails from very serious people, we also got some images and details of possible forthcoming hardware, including a cylindrical-shaped Xbox Series X that won’t include a disc drive.
Code named “Brooklin,” the leaked data indicates that the possible hardware refresh will include “more internal storage, faster Wi-Fi, reduced power” and a “more immersive controller.”
The potential 2024 hardware refresh might also see a new Xbox gamepad hit the market. The image of a controller codenamed “Sebile” shows a two-tone color design and promises modular thumbsticks and features that many a PlayStation fan have known for a few years now: “lift to wake,” “precision haptic feedback,” and an accelerometer.
Despite how the controller may look in this image, the copy indicates that it will feature the “same ergonomics” as the current Xbox Series X/S controller (codenamed “Merlin”).
Microsoft sees its next Xbox as a cloud ‘hybrid’ machine
Slides projecting the future of the Xbox platform indicate that Microsoft is very much looking to the cloud (where have I heard that before?) to help power its post Xbox Series X/S console, for which it’s looking at a 2028 release.
Microsoft describes such a machine as a “next-generation hybrid game platform capable of leveraging the combined power of the client and cloud to deliver deeper immersion and entirely new classes of game experiences.” Cool?
So while we might get some sequels to beloved games like Dishonored and a fancy new controller for Xbox and PC, the leaked Microsoft materials also portend another nail in the coffin for physical game media . But hey, maybe Mario and Master Chief will get to go on a little adventure together at some point.
Elder Scrolls VI won’t be coming to PS5 whenever it finally debuts. Though you might’ve already filed this news under “well, duh,” it’s now clear as day courtesy of official documentation from Microsoft.
This Stylish Noir-Punk Side-Scroller Is Like Celeste With Guns
Originally announced at E3 2018 (which Bethesda’s own Todd Howard thinks was perhaps a tad too early), The Elder Scrolls VI will mark the first single-player entry in the fabled Elder Scrolls series of big-ass open-world RPG romps since the undying colossal success that was 2011’s Skyrim. News on the TES6 front has otherwise been very quiet, and Bethesda only just released its other epic, long-in-development RPG, the space-themed Starfield. New reporting from Axios’ Stephen Totilo, however, makes it clear that TES6 will be an Xbox and PC exclusive.
The Elder Scrolls VI targets a 2026 release
PlayStation-owning fans of Bethesda jams have been holding out hope that despite Microsoft’s purchase of Bethesda in 2020, Elder Scrolls VI might still come to a Sony machine. CEO of Microsoft gaming Phil Spencer has said as recently as September 6 that the company considers exclusives on a “case-by-case basis” and that it “wants to make sure that [its] games are available in so many different places.”
As per a post on X (formerly Twitter) from Stephen Totilo of Axios, Microsoft’s communications during the FTC case concerning its controversial Activision merger spelled out that The Elder Scrolls VI is coming to Xbox and PC only. In a Microsoft-confidential chart that saw release due to the legal proceedings, The Elder Scrolls VI clearly has a big ol’ red X in the “Released on PlayStation?” column.
The same chart indicates that The Elder Scrolls VI is aiming for a 2026 or later release date. Given the size and scope of Bethesda games, they do take a long time to make. After The Elder Scrolls VI, Bethesda is expected to release Fallout 5.
So, sorry PlayStation Skyrim fans. But, hey, at least you got a head start on Baldur’s Gate 3. And given TES6’s likely release window, at least you’ll have enough time to save up for an Xbox or gaming-worthy PC? Hey, don’t look at me. I’m just the messenger.
Lies of P is a tough game. Everything can kill you, from the hardest of bosses to the most predictable of trash mobs, which is to be expected of a Soulslike game. Although there’s no difficulty setting to make the Bloodborne-inspired RPG any easier, there are some tips you can take with you as you skirmish with the humans and puppets waiting to kill you in this gothic reimagining of Pinocchio.
Like Bloodborne, Lies of P features a regain mechanic in which you can replenish a portion of lost health by attacking the enemy who hurt you. But in addition to regaining your lost health, staying on the offensive slowly builds up your foe’s stagger and, when their health flashes white, leaves them open for a powerful attack that’ll put them into a Groggy state. Essentially, they’re stunned, at which point you can execute a Fatal Attack to deal massive damage. Thus, the game rewards being aggressive if you want to stay alive and quickly defeat your foes. Hesitate, and you’ll die. It’s as simple as that.
Keep your weapon sharp
Battling with humans and puppets across the nightmarish city of Krat will eventually leave your weapons dull. Attack enough without addressing its plummeting durability and that blade you’re using will break, which is why it pays to maintain your armaments’ peak sharpness. However, honing your blade with the in-game Grinder does more than just ensure its optimal effectiveness; it can also give you a damage buff once you’ve leveled up the item’s capabilities. Furthermore, equipping the Grinder with an element like fire or poison will imbue your weapon with that same power, giving you an elemental edge over the violence in Krat. Take care of your weapons and they’ll take care of you.
Break your weapon in half
This might sound contradictory to the above tip, but they coexist. Lies of P lets you combine weapons together. By breaking them into their two halves, blade and handle, you can mix and match gear to create something that pairs well with your build. So, say you’re focusing on strength but like the rapier, a dexterity-based weapon. You could take the rapier’s handle, which actually dictates the armament’s attack pattern, and attach it to a blade that scales better with your stats and boom, new weapon unlocked. Now, by sharpening the blade in combat and leveling it up at the main hub world of Hotel Krat, you’re taking care of a weapon that’ll likely carry you through the rest of the game.
Level up your dodge quickly
Following feedback from the summer demo, co-developer Neowiz Games tweaked Lies of P’s sluggish dodge mechanic. Well, it needs to be reworked even more. It’s still imprecise, nonfunctional, and slow—until you level it up, that is. P has P-Organs, artificial components that mimic a real human’s organs, and which can be upgraded with Quartz, a resource you find in certain chests or get when beating bosses. Upgrading your P-Organs will do things like increase the number of healing items you have, or allow you to carry more stat-buffing artifacts. You can also unlock dodge upgrades that let you chain multiple evasive maneuvers together and roll out of a knockdown animation. Silly that you have to upgrade the dodge instead of starting with these abilities off the rip, especially since combat can be so punishing and dodging is a surefire tactic to hit-and-run gameplay. But trust me, you’re going to want to upgrade that dodge. It’ll be easier if you do.
Read those item descriptions
This may come as no surprise to Souls veterans, but Lies of P’s items have descriptions that detail much of the game’s lore. When things went to shit, how violent the puppet massacre was, who lived here and what you’ll find there—all detailed within the notes of the items you pick up around Krat. However, certain Ergo, this game’s rendition of FromSoftware’s souls resource, also contain descriptions that will tell you if a rare trader will want it in exchange for a rarer item. This could be a legendary artifact, a piece of gear that enhances your stats, or a powerful weapon. Of course, you could consume that Ergo for a massive amount of it, which will likely give you enough to level up at least once. But, if you’re willing to take the risk, you could just get a better piece of gear. Besides, defeating enemies gets you Ergo anyway. You can always make it up.
Change your outfits often
Considering Lies of P takes place during France’s opulent Belle Époque, you’ll absolutely see an assortment of beautiful—and bloodied—garments tinged with steampunk accouterments. It can be tempting to dress P up in different outfits as you journey through the darkened Krat. He is a puppet, after all. However, wearing an outfit in the game is about more than just looking stylish. Certain NPCs will interact with you differently based on what you’re wearing. Maybe they’ll attack you on sight or, instead, give you an option to work together, all depending on their relationship to the attire you’ve got on, which you can read up on in the item’s description. What’s that one quote? Knowledge is power?
Work On Your Perfect Guard Skills
So, not only does the dodge not feel that great, but to be totally honest, blocking and parrying aren’t particularly well-executed here either. That said, while the timing can be difficult to nail, mastering the perfect guard will help you go a long way in Lies of P. By pressing the block button right before an attack lands, you’ll perfectly parry your enemy’s strike. No, there’s no satisfying animation a la Sekiro. (There is a loud “clang” as the weapons collide, though.) And no, you won’t leave them immediately off-guard. However, perfect guarding your enemy enough times will increase their stagger, making them more susceptible to the Groggy state and a Fatal Strike, and break their weapon. You’ll probably die a lot on your way to figuring out just how best to perform the perfect guard, and that’s OK because mastering the move is totally worth it.
Summon—And Then Buff—Your Specter Bestie
As in many FromSoft Souls games, you can summon an AI-controlled NPC just before boss fights, and I highly encourage you to do so. There are some tough battles in Lies of P, with multiple enemies at once or truly, terrifyingly towering foes. It’s overwhelming. The specter you summon—a gorgeous, black armor-clad knight with flowy, snow-white hair—can serve as a distraction when you summon them via Star Fragments, a very common resource found in easy chests and on trash mobs and in vendor shops. This companion is already pretty tanky and can dish out plenty of damage on their own. However, attaching the mythical Wishstone crystals you come across to the Cube that functions as an additional healing item can give your specter—and you—added benefits. You can, say, prevent their death one time with the Indomitable Wishstone. Or, you can temporarily increase their damage or restore their HP with the Frenzy and Friendship Wishstones, respectively. Either way, tweaking the buffs your specter bestie has will do wonders for you.
It’s rough out there for a puppet. Thanks to the puppet frenzy that’s caused the marionettes to go ballistic, no one trusts a doll. It helps to be prepared, so these tips should make your time in the horrific world of Krat a little less frightening.
Friends, the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth hype train has left Midgar station and is barreling toward us at a fever pitch in the run-up to the RPG’s PlayStation 5 release date of February 29, 2024. Y’all see that new trailer? If you haven’t, you’ve probably at least heard fans squealing about the first look at Vincent Valentine, Zack not being dead like he’s supposed to be, and several other cool moments. All that’s well and good, but there’s one moment in the trailer we are not talking about enough. And we should be, because the best character in all of Final Fantasy VII is coming back in Rebirth: Andrea Rhodea, the king of the Honeybee Inn.
I Didn’t Play Final Fantasy XVI ‘Right,’ And That’s OK
Andrea is one of the best additions in Final Fantasy VII Remake’s new spin on an old story. He’s the owner and lead dancer of the Honeybee Inn, which was a brothel in the original 1997 Final Fantasy VII. In Remake the Honeybee Inn is a lavish nightclub, complete with extravagant dance routines, stunning costumes based on the titular bug, and a hunky pansexual king running the place.
The changes worked on a few fronts. It made the Honeybee Inn a more memorable touchstone of Cloud and Aerith’s time in the Wall Market rather than a weird, uncomfortable detour tinged with gay panic. Now it’s a celebratory moment about the freedom of expression and breaking down gender norms. The updated scene let Cloud dress in drag without shame and felt like a real queer space in a game that was otherwise willing to assume Cloud was involved with a woman as long as they were in each other’s proximity. Sure, Cloud and Aerith are just passing through, but it was a meaningful moment for Final Fantasy VII’s larger world to show that queer people and places exist.
Even as a person who doesn’t love Final Fantasy VII Remake for a lot of reasons we won’t get into—don’t get me started on my lack of faith in Square to pull off an Evangelion-style meta-commentary after nearly every extended universe it’s done in Final Fantasy has undermined the source material in some way—the Honeybee Inn scene remains an all-time great moment for me in the series. It’s joyful to watch unfold, and Andrea is one of the most captivating characters for as little screentime as he gets.
Given that he’s a side character and pretty tied to a specific location the party is departing at the end of Final Fantasy VII Remake, I didn’t think we’d see Andrea again in Rebirth, or the third game that will wrap up this revamped story. But it looks like we’re heading to the Gold Saucer in Rebirth, and Andrea is about to dance his ass off once again.
And look at this king fucking go. He was a charismatic dancer in Remake, even when saddled with a newbie dance partner like Cloud. Whenever I heard a catchy pop song back in 2020 (say, anything from Lady Gaga’s “Chromatica”) images of Andrea and Cloud dancing immediately entered my mind, like an old screensaver or music video. So I’m sure the new choreography he and his crew are working on in Rebirth will stamp itself onto any pop album I listen to in 2024.
Square Enix
I really loved Dion and his gay relationship in Final Fantasy XVI, but because of a few disappointing decisions Square Enix made with the character, I still left that game a bit saddened by its apparent hesitance to showcase his love story with the same confidence as it did his straight counterparts’. Fresh off Remake’s Andrea, an incredibly proud queer man in the Final Fantasy universe, Dion’s treatment felt like two steps forward and one step back. I don’t expect Andrea will play a huge role in Rebirth, but I’m very glad to see he’s back, killing it on the stage, and looking fine as hell in white.
Nexus Mods, one of the largest online repositories of fan-made video game modifications, recently deleted a Starfield mod that removed the game’s built-in option to choose a pronoun for your created character. As you might expect, this removal angered a very toxic portion of players who yelled at Nexus Mods over its choice and threatened to stop using the massive site. But Nexus Mods is sticking with its decision and has a message to angry bigots: We aren’t sad to see you leave.
11 Minutes Of Saturday Morning Cartoon Roguelike Gameplay
Starfield, one of the biggest games of 2023, is also a Bethesda RPG. That means it’s a large open-world game filled with quests and places to explore, but it also has some annoying bugs and frustrating design choices. And as usual, PC-based modders have come to the rescue to help tweak and improve the game. While many of these mods are useful and/or fun, some aren’t as positive, like a mod that removes the ability to choose a pronoun, a small feature in the game that became a viral talking point among toxic losers upset about Starfield being “woke.” However, if you try to download that mod from Nexus Mods today, you won’t find it, because the people running the site didn’t want it around.
In a report from 404Media published Friday, Nexus Mods told the outlet that while it doesn’t see itself as the “police of what people can and cannot mod into (or out of) their games” it does decide which content it wants to host or not host. And Nexus Mods said hosting this pronoun-removal mod was “not for us.”
“It is certainly within our rights not to host content on our platform,” Nexus Mods told 404Media. It also said the mod’s removal wasn’t a “political statement” or the site picking sides in the ongoing culture war. Instead, it said it simply believes in “diversity and inclusion,” adding that the “removal of diversity, while appealing to many, does not promote a positive modding community.”
Nexus Mods isn’t phased by toxic comments
If you’ve been on the internet at all in the last few years, you know what happened next. Lots of angry chuds hopped into forums and social media threads to yell about how this was evil censorship and infringing on their rights. For its part, Nexus Mods doesn’t care about the reaction.
“A reinforcement that this has been the best course of action has been some of the hatred, vitriol, and threats of violence coming from a very, very small minority of the community,” Nexus Mods said. “Frankly, we are not sad to see them go.”
This isn’t the first time the popular modding site has upset toxic assholes. In 2022, Nexus took similar action against a mod for Spider-Man Remastered that removed Pride flags from the game’s New York City. That mod would later be re-uploaded to the Internet Archive; a good reminder to those claiming these mods are no longer accessible, they are, you just can’t get them from one specific site anymore.
At the time, Nexus Mods had this to say in a blog post explaining why it had deleted the Spider-Man mod from its site: “We are for inclusivity, we are for diversity. If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it.”
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth continues after the eventsof Final Fantasy VII Remake, which took the first major section of 1997’s classic RPG Final Fantasy VII and translated it into an action-RPG. Remake’s storyline also changed up some details, both big and small, to create what appears to be a new timeline that is both separate from but somehow connected to that of the original game and its many spin-offs.
PlayStation / Square Enix
Today’s trailer for the upcoming Rebirth shows this new sequel will continue to shake things up, depicting Zack from Crisis Core carrying Cloud into a city, something that doesn’t happen in the original game. (Also…Cloud riding a Segway?)
Interesting stuff! Anyway, the new trailer looks cool, so you might be excited to pre-order the game ahead of its February 29, 2024 debut. About that. The standard edition of the game will cost $69.99, and the “deluxe” will be $99.99. But the biggest, most expensive version of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the collector’s edition…and it costs more than a Nintendo Switch.
What’s included in the Collector’s Edition of FF7 Rebirth?
•Final Fantasy VII Rebirth – Deluxe Edition Art BookMini SoundtrackSteelBook® Case
•Large Collectible Statue Approx. 48cm / 19 inches tall and depicting the iconic antagonist Sephiroth in highly detailed sculpting. The wing can be detached.
•Moogle Trio Summoning Materia (DLC) A summoning materia that can call “Moogle Trio” in the game.
•Magic Pot Summoning Materia (DLC) A summoning materia that can call “Magic Pot” in the game.
•Accessory: Reclaimant Choker (DLC) A choker with an effect of restoring HP when an enemy is defeated.
•Armor: Orchid Bracelet (DLC) A bracelet that gives courage to traverse an expanding world.
•Armor: Midgar Bangle Mk. II (DLC) A bracelet worn by travelers leaving Midgar.
So, does all of this sound like it’s worth $350? For some, the answer is probably yes. For others, a solid maybe. And for many out there, like me, the answer is a strong “nope.”
Personally, the prospect of a $350 edition of a video game makes me roll my eyes so hard they fall out of my head and I have to scramble around on the floor for a few minutes to pick them back up. But I’m also not a person who cares much for statues or collectibles. At the very least it’s nice that Square Enix is including a physical copy of the game in this pricey package!
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth launches on February 29, 2024 exclusively on PlayStation 5. The base game costs $70. The deluxe edition is $100. And as mentioned, the Collector’s Edition, at $350, costs more than an Xbox Series S.
The fall season is fast approaching and with it comes a new lineup of games for PlayStation Plus subscribers. Keeping in line with last month’s diverse catalog of PS Plus offerings, September’s list features role-playing games, first-person shooters, and gorgeous story-driven games coming to the service on September 19.
I Didn’t Play Final Fantasy XVI ‘Right,’ And That’s OK
First up is Nier: Replicant ver.1.22474487139, the 2021 remaster of Square Enix’s cult-classic 2010 action-RPG, Nier: Gestalt. Summarizing this predecessor to creator Yoko Taro’s later mega-hit Nier: Automata is a bit of a tall task considering its many twists, turns, and multiple endings. All you need to know is you play as a nameless protagonist as he and his party of outcasts battle against hordes of otherworldly monsters to save his kidnapped sister. The game is chock full of anime-esque weapons and even more (slightly clunky) anime-inspired combat and its soundtrack unequivocably fucks.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim – 13 Stories Trailer | PS4
Another big get in September will be the sci-fi time-traveling with mechs (!) saga 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. Developed by Vanillaware, 13 Sentinels follows a group of high school students who summon giant mechs to defend their city from invading kaiju. 13 Sentinels plays like a mix between a tactical tower defense game and a 2D side-scrolling adventure game with lovely background art. If that’s a sufficient elevator pitch for you, I would advise keeping a notepad on hand because the game has a bunch of mind-blowing twists that’ll make your brain whirl.
PS Plus Line-Up For September 2023
Here’s everything else coming to PS Plus in September:
Sid Meier’s Civilization VI
Star Ocean The Divine Force
Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2
Odin Sphere Leifthrasir
Unpacking
Planet Coaster: Console Edition
This War of Mine: Final Cut
Cloudpunk
Contra: Rogue Corps
Tails Noir
Call of the Sea
West of Dead
Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness
PAW Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls
And here are the additional games coming for PlayStation Premium members (it’s mostly more Star Ocean):
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.
The Top 10 Most-Played Games On Steam Deck: August 2023 Edition
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.
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.
Starfield, Bethesda’s newest RPG, is, well…a big game. It’s filled with quests to complete and aliens to shoot. It’s also jam-packed with items to grab, sell, and manipulate. And it’s very easy to pick up too much junk and suddenly find yourself overencumbered, unable to fast-travel or sprint as much as usual. That’s no fun! But you can avoid this annoying situation.
Diablo IV – Bear Bender Build
I’ve played about 55 hours of Starfield so far, and for most of that time, I’ve not been overencumbered. In fact, I’m usually carrying under 100kg of weight at any given time. What’s my secret? Well, after years of playing Bethesda games, I’ve gotten pretty good at managing all the weapons, health items, and junk you collect as you adventure through the studio’s massive open-world RPGs. So let me help you stop being overencumbered with these tips and tricks!
Stop grabbing everything
Look, okay, I know this is very obvious and all that, but…yeah, stop grabbing everything! I get it. This is a Bethesda game and one of the joys of these RPGs is how everything can be grabbed, manipulated, stored, and sold. Every plastic cup and dart and sandwich. But you don’t need to grab it all.
You might be thinking “I’ll sell this all for credits!” Well, sure, but you won’t get that much for that junk. And there are better ways to make credits in this game, like doing quests and selling high-value items like rare suits, guns, and very lightweight objects that are worth hundreds of credits. So yeah, stop. Put that cup down. Walk away. Leave it. Leave it! I’m watching.
Level up your carrying capacity
Certain stats are always useful in a Bethesda open-world RPG. Having extra health and the ability to lockpick anything, for example, are as handy in Starfield as they were in Skyrim.
Similarly, leveling up the skill that lets you carry more stuff without becoming overencumbered is very useful. I also recommend grabbing this early so you can start grinding away at its requirements to unlock higher levels. Trust me, this will save you time in the long run.
Make a habit out of checking for heavy items
You can sort your entire inventory by weight and you should do this regularly, as you’ll often find some random spacesuit or other item taking up a large chunk of your carrying capacity. Take care of these items and don’t let them clutter up your character. While looking at your heaviest bits of junk, you might also find one of the most likely culprits for why you are overencumbered: ship parts.
Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku
Don’t hold on to ship parts
Ship parts! These items are very useful, letting you repair your ship during combat. However, they are also very heavy, weighing 10kg each. It’s very easy to collect a stack of these and not realize it until you pick up a gun and become overencumbered.
Making matters worse, these heavy items are found not in your resources or misc. tab, but instead buried with your aid items, like food and health kits. This makes them easy to miss when dropping off resources to your ship. I’d love a future update to move these to resources by default. Until then, double-check whenever you feel too heavy to make sure you aren’t carrying around a bunch of these bulky items. And, one last thing: You can store these on your ship and still use them, no need to carry them around!
Pick a few weapons and sell the rest
There are a lot of weapons in Starfield, from laser rifles to old Earth shotguns and more. It’s a smorgasbord of killing options. But while I recommend you try everything at least once early on in Starfield, after the opening hours you should settle on three or four weapons and sell or store the rest.
This has a lot of benefits. You can focus your skills more, carry less ammo, and not have to manage an armory everywhere you go. But also, it means you’ll not be bogged down by 12 weapons all using up your precious carrying capacity! And that’s—hey, I told you to put down that plastic cup! Stop! Just because we’re on a new tip doesn’t mean I stopped watching!
Use your ship’s cargo bay to store resources/valuables
After you’ve been out on a planet exploring, mining, or completing quests, you should take a moment to drop off excess items in your ship’s cargo hold. Thankfully, Bethesda added a hotkey that lets you send all your resources—like minerals, metals, etc.—right to your ship with one button press.
But don’t just store resources in your ship’s cargo containers. You can store rare suits or guns you want to sell later in there too, as well as other items that are taking up space. And if your ship starts to run out of space, well, first, maybe stop grabbing everything. But also, invest in adding some more storage to your ship, which you can do at any spaceport with an NPC starship technician. Oh, and don’t forget: You can upgrade your ship’s storage capacity via the Payloads perk.
Screenshot: Bethesda / Kotaku
Look for spacesuits that have extra storage
During my third night of playing Starfield, I stumbled upon a legendary suit that let me carry 40 extra kilograms on my character. While you might not find one as good as this, keep an eye out for spacesuits that provide extra storage.
Spread the weight around to companions
If you travel with a companion, don’t forget to use them like a pack mule. They can carry quite a bit, which can help out a lot in big space dungeons filled with good loot. Just talk to your companion and ask to trade, then shove all the plastic cups and crappy guns into their inventory so you can sell it all later.
And, if all else fails, use chems or booze to temporarily boost your capacity
Perhaps you’ve done everything above and yet still find yourself carrying too much junk. Well, that’s why I recommend keeping some whiskey or other chems on hand, as using them can increase your carrying capacity.
Keep in mind that these are just temporary solutions and won’t last forever. But they can, in a pinch, help you stop being overencumbered just long enough to fast-travel and sell all your junk.
Starfield is here and it’s easily one of the biggest video games of 2023, both in terms of how large its digital galaxy is and just how much hype is surrounding Bethesda’s latest RPG. So it should come as no surprise that we here at Kotaku have spent a lot of time covering it. From tips about how to sell your loot to reports on modding controversies and our thoughts on the game itself, we’ve written a lot of cool stuff about Starfield.
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This article is meant to be your one-stop shop for all our Starfield posts, from the serious the silly. As the game settles in and we keep reporting, we’ll update this over the coming days, weeks, and months.
Pluto isn’t a planet. That really shouldn’t be a controversial statement any more, but it regains new contentiousness with the release of epic space RPG, Starfield. Developer and streamer Alanah Pearce wanted to find out if Bethesda’s epic space RPG really does require fast travel for all interplanetary travel, by setting off on the seven hour trip from Earth to the dwarf planet.
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Starfield intends players to use fast travel to move between planets and solar systems. Disappointing many, who had hoped for a more natural ability to fly from orb to orb, it was widely speculated that the game was instead beaming players into bordered skyboxes within a solar system, with the uninhabited planets just decorations on the walls. Brave explorer, podcaster, and Santo Monica Studios writer, Alanah Pearce, decided to find out the truth.
Pearce’s plan was to fly within the familiar trails of the Milky Way to discover if those extra worlds could be reached under a player’s own space-steam. To do this, the plan was to point toward a location, then leave the game running while she slept. However, Pearce’s first problem was where to head. Initially trying to aim for Earth, it turned out that the game’s ultra-realistic planetary orbits would have made it unrealistic to accurately aim before heading to bed. Instead, after much deliberation, the decision was made to point the ship to the right of Pluto.
It turns out it’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. Every time Pearce’s Xbox controller fell asleep, the game paused, meaning there were stretches of the night where no progress was made until the streamer woke up to hit A, then went back to sleep.
On waking seven hours later, what Pearce unequivocally proved is that the game isn’t using skyboxes. The solar systems depicted in the enormous space map are for real, and like the real thing, mostly made of terrifyingly vast stretches of absolutely nothing. And now she was 47 kilometers from the dwarf body.
By this point, the textures were heavily blurred, suggesting Bethesda had not intended anyone to do this. Rather confirming that, on actually reaching the non-planet, Pearce flew straight through the skin of Pluto’s surface, on some level going “inside” it, whereupon the trans-Neptunian object became invisible showing the rest of space around her ship.
Getting out the other side proved somewhat trickier. Because, even though Pluto is endlessly demeaned for its diminutive size, it still has a diameter of 2,376km. And travelling at these subspace speeds meant that would take hours itself. So, you know, Alanah Pearce went back to bed.
After another five hours, the ship was outside of the planet again. Astonishingly, in the process, Pearce reports that she was so tired that she’d fainted on her return to bed and smacked her head. But it was for Science.
Physical confrontation, financial responsibility, emotional insecurities–these are things I run away from in life. So why wouldn’t I default to role-playing as the coward that I am in Bethesda’s latest epic, Starfield? Unfortunately, space doesn’t seem all that welcoming to conflict-avoidant people, as Starfield forces me to fight more often than not.
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Bethesda has not advertised Starfield as a potential space pacifist sim (it was made perfectly in clear back in August that a no-kill run is not possible), but I wanted to jump in and see just how much freedom I had to play the game at my own pace and with my own approach. Can I outmaneuver and outwit violent situations? Can I strive to be above aggression and explore the game holding to the ideals of pacifism? Frustratingly, no.
Look, I love a shooty game. Probably to unhealthy degrees. And I love a shooty game in space. Especially with big explosions. But Bethesda’s first-person action is not what I come to these games for. Fallout 4’s point-and-shoot mechanics were a massive improvement, for sure, over Fallout 3’s, but it still didn’t compare to the likes of even Borderlands, let alone a dedicated shooter of the kind we’re all familiar with.
There I go killing again
Everything I saw in the trailers for Starfield promised me the fantasy of video games: Shoot stuff! Blow shit up! Isn’t this so freaking awesome?? But I wanted something different, quiet, contemplative, with risk of death for sure, but also an opportunity to be my own character in this world. Something more like what I’d find in an Ursula K. LeGuin novel instead of John Wick in space. I wanted to gaze into the abyss of “the blackest sea,” marvel at the celestial bodies above, and try to avoid getting riddled full of bullets as best I could without returning the aggression.
Starfield didn’t care for my desire for peace in its early moments; and thus far that doesn’t look like it’ll change much. In drawing me into its combat, it broke a sense of freedom I was after and reminded me why I loathe gunplay in Bethesda games. Yes, Starfield has the best-feeling guns to aim and shoot in comparison to previous releases from the studio, but the RPG mechanics under the hood shatter my immersion and its confusing ammo management immediately frustrates me.
In Starfield’s opening moments, I emerge from some space mines where my character has a little Commander Shepard-esque vision after touching a spooky space object™. A dude comes down from the sky and says “yo, you’re special, let’s go talk to people.” (I’m paraphrasing.)
My pacifistic and somewhat skeptical gal doesn’t want to go anywhere with this stranger. She wants to stick to mining. But then pirates show up and start shooting people. Just another day in the galaxy.
The HUD prompt reads “Hold off the pirates” and “(Optional) Grab a weapon.” Cool, I think, I’m not doing either of those things. Remember, I’m a coward and so is my character.
I run into the ship. And it’s locked. That makes sense. Gunfire echoes off in the near distance and I figure I’ll just park myself here while people shoot each other. Maybe the pirates will win and I’ll be fucked. Could be a short end, but that’s the price of trying to play this way.
The gunfire continues. I get bored, so I start walking around the perimeter of the firefight. Occasionally, a pirate catches sight of me and fires off a few rounds, but they rarely pursue me. I am content with parking myself on the roof of a space building, or hiding behind random objects, and just letting these people kill each other.
That takes just over 10 minutes as the AI struggles to find each other–when they do land their shots, it matters little, as characters in this game are immersion-shattering bullet sponges.
It took well over 10 minutes for the AI to finish this fight on its own.Gif: Bethesda / Kotaku
I get it, this area is meant to be a space for you to get a sense for how the guns feel and the overall pace of Starfield’s action. But it fails to provide the opening moments I was looking for, it fails to let me roleplay my character the way I wanted to.
After the pirates die, I once again try to insist that I don’t want to go anywhere. No one will listen to me (even in space I can’t catch a break, apparently), and so I took off in this guy’s ship, only for some pirate ships to show up and start firing at me.
I managed to get out of the previous skirmish without firing a round, maybe I can do the same here? Nope. Absolutely not. It would seem that your first voyage into the void necessitates a dogfight.
I try everything, flying off to another planet, flying back down to the planet I came from, trying to put space between me and my space assailant. None of it works. Unlike No Man’s Sky, you can’t just dive down to the planet’s surface and keep burning your engines until you lose someone. Starfield really wants you to engage in space fights.
The planet just won’t get any closer!Gif: Bethesda / Kotaku
That’s how my girl has to kill her first pirate. Not because a scenario emerges that sparked such violence, but because the game won’t let me past a sequence without it. Guess I’m a murderer now?
Relentless combat, sparse resources
The next two gun fights I get into further remind me that Starfield wants me to play a very specific way, and that’s largely by interacting with the world through violence. That can be fun, don’t get me wrong—I mean, I happily play Call of Duty regularly for god’s sake and you should hear the things that come out of my mouth when I’m caught in a frustrating game of cat and mouse with someone in DMZ—but it’s a bit disappointing that this enormous RPG that seems to promise a depth of choice is often so invested in railroading you into shootouts in corridors.
So I relent. Okay, I can work with this for my character concept: The pirate encounter forced my girl into violence, but that is never her first option. She now begrudgingly carries a pistol with the words “no gods, no masters” inscribed on it by its previous owner, a painful reminder that, yes, this galaxy is a cruel place, and hopefully she can preserve her humanity as she follows the Constellation organization to try and figure out what the hell is going on in her own mind.
I want her to only carry pistols, choosing to stay away from aggressive military weaponry as she isn’t a soldier and doesn’t have the fortitude or skill to be using a high-powered weapon. Preferably just one (and that’s a build I’m still hoping to zero in on). But as soon as I get to a space station orbiting the moon, following what feels like a narratively urgent situation, Starfield makes it clear that it wants more violence out of me, and of varying kinds. Upon entry, I discovered two opposing groups of folks shooting at each other. And when they catch sight of me? They shoot at me, too.
So I return fire with my pistol. Bang, bang, bang, click! I’m out of 6.5 caliber ammunition. Where do I get more? The enemies I’m fighting don’t carry it. They have Grendel SMGs with a different caliber. I decide to rely on a melee strike with an ax, but that gets me killed as I’m out-personed and outgunned. I die.
Reluctantly, I switch to the SMG, take out a few more folks before swiftly running out of ammo again.This time I grab a shotgun. Cool. I’m now a walking arsenal (seriously, I could just be playing Halo or something if I wanted this), but at least I have powerful weaponry. Well, powerful weaponry is always kept in check by Starfield’s levels and stats, so point-blank-shots of shotgun rounds don’t result in death or debilitating injury, just a little chunk off enemies’ health bars.
In games like The Last of Us, I love the pressure and intensity of making each shot count; but in Starfield each shot is only worth as much as a damage value, so it kinda doesn’t matter how well you place it. Starfield has smooth gunplay with none of the benefits of being skilled in aiming. It’s all in the numbers.
One of these bullets will kill you. Eventually!Gif: Bethesda / Kotaku
Right now I’m still stuck on this moon base. And no amount of firepower I’m capable of can get through this scenario. It’s feeling like I need to fall back and grind out some quests to gain better power, or find other ways of dealing with this situation.
Either way, the inability to find non-violent solutions to problems and the burden of Bethesda’s first-person-shooter action have made for an abrasive early experience. Starfield is otherwise appealing, from the bold presentation of the environments to the inviting and intimidating sense of scale. Hopefully I find my stride, but my aspiration of being a pacifist space traveler looks to be as dead as the people the game pushes me to kill.
Starfield is finally here and it is big, complex, and often overwhelming. There are tons of menus to navigate, cities to get acquainted with, and skill trees to invest in, not to mention resource mining, base building, and ship customization. Before you get into any of that, however, let’s go over some basic tips and advice to get you started.
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Currently live for fans who purchased the Deluxe Edition or Game Pass upgrade, Starfield is a sprawling sci-fi RPG where one minute you’re haggling with a bar keep for information and the next you’re shooting a bunch of space pirates and stealing all of their credits. But there’s a lot of minutia to get lost in, from confusing menus to maps that don’t tell you where anything is. What follows is a quick guide with some tricks and shortcuts for surviving Starfield’s opening hours and beginning your journey into the outer reaches of the galaxy.
Don’t worry about how your character looks
You can change it anytime by visiting an Enhance! shop and paying 500 credits. The nearest one at the start is in the commercial district in New Atlantis.
Make hard saves all the time
You never know when things might go wrong in Starfield. You might fail a persuasion roll or get jumped by giant aliens, or even accidentally crash your ship into the space station you’re trying to dock on. The game auto-saves but it’s not foll-proof. It’s a Bethesda game, after all.
Lower music volume and raise voice volume
Starfield comes out of the gate with very loud and intense music. And that’s fine. But after about 20 minutes, I struggled to hear what people were saying. Looking at the default settings, voice volume isn’t as high as it probably should be, so knock that up a bit and turn music down a little, too. Trust me, you’ll still be able to hear it fine.
Loot the pirates after the first fight for an assault rifle
The first big fight in Starfield isn’t very hard and the game quickly pushes you to leave. But first, go grab at least one assault rifle (and some other goodies) off those pirates you just wasted.
Loot everything and give it to Vasco
Speaking of looting stuff, feel free to grab everything and just dump it on the robot who partners up with you in the early hours of Starfield. Like in previous Bethesda games, your companions are pack mules with dialogue trees. Use ‘em! To do so, just chat with the bot (or other companions) and ask to trade items.
Use cover like a modern shooter
Aiming near cover will have you pop out in a way that feels unlike any previous Bethesda RPG. Sure, dynamic cover like this has been around since 2012-ish, but hey, I’m not going to complain about Starfield having good combat compared to Fallout 4 and Skyrim.
Use the laser mining tool for killing
The Cutter you get at the very beginning is deceptively great in battle. It works on a cooldown with unlimited ammo, and can stun-lock enemies at close range. Pull it out every now and again to save precious bullets early on.
Set your helmet and space suit to disappear when not needed
Early on in the game, Starfield tells you to go into your menus to put on your helmet. You might be mistaken and think you have to do that every time you want to take it off or put it on. (And you need it out in space to live.) But nope! Just leave it and your suit on, then go into the inventory section for each. You’ll find an option at the bottom of the screen letting them disappear automatically when not needed, like in towns or stations. No more running around cities looking like a giant dork!
Pump up your persuasion trait ASAP!
If you don’t want to waste all your resources fighting through every encounter, make sure to put some points into persuasion. It will increase the odds that you can talk people down from fights and generally make it much easier to manipulate people, which is why you’re playing this game, right?
Careful you don’t sell your equipped gear
The game won’t check you while you’re pawning off all your loot so spam that sell button with caution.
Save time by fast-traveling directly through the quest menu
You don’t always have to navigate through your cumbersome star chart to get to a new planet. If you want to go to the next location for a mission and you’ve already been there before, simply use the “select course” option from the pause menu to automatically head to the destination.
Scan everything all the time
Starfield basically gives you detective vision. In addition to scanning planets, your helmet sensor will also scan everything right in front of you, highlighting nearby enemies and valuable loot. This is also how you survey fauna for extra XP. Plus, you can use it to find your ship’s location on the horizon and instantly fast travel to it.
Don’t forget to take a nap
Sleeping will fully heal you and also give you a “well-rested” bonus that increases the rate at which you earn XP.
Use the research station on your ship to get access to more craftable stuff
You can upgrade guns, suits, and helmets as well as cook food in this game. But you’ll need to do some research first. You’ll need some materials, like iron and fiber, but once you have some you can unlock new mods and things to craft, letting you improve guns and make good suits even better.
Hitting undo while lockpicking still spends a digipick
So be careful, they’re hard to come by!
Use your ship inventory
You don’t just have to give all of your extra items to companions or throw them on the floor, you can also store them in the ship’s cargo hold by selecting it from the ship part of the menu (bottom left). It’s not unlimited but it has more than enough room in the beginning.
Designate weapons and healing items as favorites to save time
As far as I can tell, in the first few hours of the game at least, Starfield doesn’t say anything about favoriting weapons. But you should totally do that! Like in past Bethesda games, you can map guns, medkits, knives, and more to your d-pad and then quickly switch weapons during combat without needing to open the game’s (not great) menus. Simply replace an item with something else to change up your favorites.
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.
