Bethesda’s forthcoming space epic Starfieldis apparently so long, it’s made the developer’s head of publishing Pete Hines lose all sense of time. At a Bethesda MainStream event during Gamescom 2023, Hines said he felt like the action role-playing game didn’t “really […] get going” until he took 50 hours to finish its main quest. That was after he’d already dropped 80 hours into sidequests.
Diablo IV – Bear Bender Build
“80 hours in, I went from doing one game to a completely different game where I started really focusing on the main quest,” said Hines, “and then I got so caught up in the main quest, that I spent the next 50 hours just doing that. […] I’m here to tell you that this game doesn’t really even get going until you finish the main quest.”
“Telling somebody, ‘Oh, I played Starfield for 40 hours’ tells you nothing about what that person has done,” he said.
130 hours is an intimidating amount to put into anything, let alone something that turbo-blasts blue light directly into your eyeballs and brain. But try not to worry for your ocular health yet—it might not take you as long as it took Hines to bring the game to max speed.
In 2022, Starfield director Todd Howard estimated its main quest would take a player around 30 and up to 40 hours to beat. I suppose that isn’t much of a difference from 50, but at least you could have around 10 more hours to, like, go outside. Or play Crash Bandicoot.
In any case, Hines maintains that Starfield will claim a huge portion of your time. In another Gamescom conversation, this one with IGN, he said, “If I’m being honest, there’s really not an amount of time that I’m comfortable enough [with saying] ‘Now you’ve played enough Starfield to get what this game is.’ Because, like, I’m at 150, 160 hours on my current playthrough, and […] I haven’t even come close.”
Start clearing your schedule, then. Premium or Constellation Edition buyers can play Starfield in Early Access starting September 1, and the game is officially out for everyone on Xbox Series X/S and PC September 6.
Ever since Baldur’s Gate 3 exploded in popularity after its August 3 release date, the fact that it’s not coming to Xbox Series X/S the same time as PS5 has reignited the controversy around Microsoft’s console strategy and its commitment to a policy that seems like it will become increasingly unworkable in the years ahead.
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Baldur’s Gate 3 supports local co-op splitscreen, and developer Larian Studios has been very public about its struggle to get that feature working on the less powerful Series S. Microsoft requires games to launch with the same modes on both Series X and S, and despite Baldur’s Gate 3’s popularity, no exceptions were made for the critically acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons RPG until now.
Larian director Swen Vincke said the studio had arrived at a solution after meeting with Phil Spencer, Microsoft Gaming’s CEO, at Gamescom this week. “Series S will not feature split-screen coop, but will also include cross-save progression between Steam and Xbox Series,” he tweeted, with the games now confirmed to arrive before the end of 2023.
Spencer was asked about the apparent Series S conflict in a Eurogamer interview earlier this week. “I don’t see a world where we drop S,” he said. “In terms of parity, I don’t think you’ve heard from us or Larian, that this was about parity. I think that’s more that the community is talking about it. There are features that ship on X today that do not ship on S, even from our own games, like ray-tracing that works on X, it’s not on S in certain games.”
It’s unclear if Spencer means that split-screen gameplay in Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t a requirement on Series S. Kotaku reached out to both Microsoft and Larian Studios to clarify the situation. What is clear is that the company doesn’t plan to abandon Series S support for games in the near future. “We’re going to learn from this experience as well because we don’t love that [Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t on Xbox yet],” Spencer told IGN in a separate interview. “But I don’t think it’s something that’s a fatal flaw in the system. It’s partners prioritizing their time, us listening and being a good partner to them.”
Image: Larian Studios
The Series S has been raising questions from the very start. As Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier pointed out on August 24, even prior to its 2019 release there were concerns from game developers that the difference in performance could make realizing their full “next-gen” ambitions more difficult on Xbox. Anecdotal reports from Gamescom are that developers there have been privately sharing frustrations about the challenges presented by the Series S as well.
Spencer noted to IGN that games like Diablo IV work fine across both platforms, and reiterated that Microsoft wants to open up gaming to more people, and sees the Series S’s low price as a cornerstone of that strategy. At $300, the less powerful console is the same price as the Nintendo Switch and $100 cheaper than the disc-less PlayStation 5. Over the recent holiday period, it was briefly marked down even further to $250. And the option to subscribe to Game Pass means Series S owners can access a huge library of games, including new blockbusters like Starfield, without shelling out hundreds more.
The popularity of the Series S for players might also be what makes it that much harder for Microsoft to leave it behind. “I also wouldn’t expect and don’t think it makes sense for Microsoft to drop Xbox Series S support or have some titles only ship on Xbox Series X,” tweeted Niko analyst Daniel Ahmad. “The primary reason being that Series S makes up a significant part of the Xbox Series X|S install base and people did indeed buy it to play ‘next gen’ games.”
Don’t expect big price drops
As laudable as the goal of an affordable next-gen console is, we’re already nearing the three-year anniversary of the Series X/S, traditionally the halfway-point in a console’s lifecycle. If there are already rumblings of some games struggling to support certain features on Series S, it seems likely to get worse by 2024, especially for timed exclusives getting ported directly from the PS5. That would be the same year in the Xbox One’s lifecycle that Microsoft released the Xbox One X mid-generation refresh that aimed to offer 4K resolution and higher framerates. A similar new console has already been ruled out this time around, however.
Spencer told Bloomberg in June that he doesn’t feel an “imperative” to release a more powerful version of the Series X, and reiterated that at Gamescom. We’re focused right now on the increased storage Xbox Series S,” he told IGN. “But no, like I said, we’re kind of at the end of the beginning in my mind. So I think we need to let devs settle on this hardware and get the most out of it.”
Image: Microsoft
Sony, meanwhile, appears set to launch a PS5 Slim within the next year. While it’s not clear if that console will have meaningfully different specs than the existing ones, it would still be a significant iteration on the hardware, especially if reports of a standalone attachable disc drive for the PS5 are also accurate. Microsoft hinted at the new console in a Federal Trade Commission court hearing in June, and footage of what’s believed to be the case at a manufacturing plant in China recently leaked as well.
Whatever new console or hardware refreshes arrive in the years ahead, Spencer warned players not to expect prices to significantly drop like they have in previous generations. “You’re not going to be able to start with a console that’s $500 thinking it’s gonna get to 200 bucks. That won’t happen,” he told Eurogamer. “It’s not the way it used to be where you could take a spec and then ride it out over 10 years and ride the price points down. It’s why you see console pricing relatively flat.”
In fact, prices have been going in the opposite direction. Microsoft raised the price of the Xbox Series X/S abroad, following in Sony’s footsteps from a year prior. Even the Nintendo Switch, released over six years ago, remains the same $300 today that it was then. The Mario maker has now sold over 125 million units. So far at least, Microsoft doesn’t seem on track to hit even half of that. It’s currently at 21 million according to a presentation slide that leaked earlier this summer, with hardware sales slowing down instead of speeding up.
Starfield could change that when it arrives on September 1. Director Todd Howard says he plays it almost exclusively on his Series S and it works just great on the cheaper console.
Update 8/24/2023 11:59 a.m. ET: Added new information about Series S version of Baldur’s Gate 3.
The Xbox app has a section called “popular with friends” that shows you the games your buddies are playing. It can be a handy little tool for bothering your friends about their progress in Diablo IV or needling them over their refusal to stop playing Overwatch 2 (it’s me, I’m that friend).
But based on a picture shared on Reddit, it looks like at least one person has early access to Starfield: Phil Spencer. The screenshot shared shows Spencer’s Xbox profile picture, an Xbox Avatar version of him (notice he’s also wearing a t-shirt and jeans, so it’s lore-accurate) against a purple background, underneath both Starfield and Exoprimal, a dinosaur shooter from Capcom that came to Xbox Game Pass on July 14.
While Spencer playing Exoprimal checks out as the game just launched, his apparent access to Starfield is interesting. It makes sense, though—Spencer and Todd Howard have worked closely together to promote the upcoming Bethesda RPG ever since Microsoft bought Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax in 2021. At Summer Game Fest, they sat down for a press presentation alongside the head of Xbox Game Studios, Matt Booty, and head of Xbox’s gaming ecosystem, Sarah Bond. If you’re the head of Xbox, you can have a little Starfield early access as a treat.
Based on the Reddit post, it seems like Spencer was playing Starfield on July 14, the day the news dropped that the FTC failed to pause Microsoft’s $69 million purchase of Activision. Maybe he was celebrating the lengthy battle by hopping from planet to planet in Starfield, his mind finally free from fretting over whether Microsoft would get another jewel in its gaming Infinity Gauntlet or not. In space, no one can hear you gloat.
We’ve covered the special Starfield-branded Xbox controllers before. They were one of the worst-kept secrets of 2023, alongside the Starfield-branded Xbox headset that is already joining them on store shelves. What I did not know until today was how damn cool the controller’s triggers are.
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I mean, I like the controller design itself. I’m not exactly hyped for Starfield, I can take it or leave it, but the beauty of this pad in particular is that it doesn’t really look like a branded controller at all. It just looks like an Xbox controller with a really cool late-70s/early-80s sci-fi theme, like it was something out of The Last Starfighter, and so even if you had no idea what Starfield was, or did and did not care for it, you could still be into this controller.
Anyway! That aesthetic discourse off my chest, I want to talk about the triggers. From leaked product shots we already knew the triggers had a transparent housing, but it was one thing seeing them just sitting around. It’s another seeing them moving, because as long as we have had vibrating controllers—and it’s been decades now—I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the mechanics of them actually vibrating before while you’ve got the finished product in your hand:
That’s neat! Not surprising, we all knew roughly how they worked, but it’s still cool seeing it in action like that. Cool and worrying, because seeing how fast and hard those little guys have to work to keep rumbling I have no idea how controllers last as long as they do. Provided, uh, they actually last as long we want them to.
The Xbox Series X/S controller is $80 while the gaming headset is $125.
Since Starfield was revealed, fans have been wondering what framerate the sci-fi RPG would run at on console. In a new interview with IGN, creative director Todd Howard confirmed the Xbox Series X/S version would remain locked at 30fps to maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the game.
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“I think it’ll come as no surprise, given our previous games, what we go for,” Howard told IGN after the Starfield Direct today. “Always these huge, open worlds, fully dynamic, hyper detail where anything can happen. And we do want to do that. It’s 4K in the X. It’s 1440 on the S. We do lock it at 30, because we want that fidelity, we want all that stuff. We don’t want to sacrifice any of it.”
The longtime Bethesda game designer added that the game is “running great” and even sometimes at 60fps. “But on the consoles, we do lock it because we prefer the consistency, where you’re not even thinking about it,” he said. It’s also apparently performing well on the less powerful Xbox Series S where Howard said he plays most of the time since his kids monopolize the Xbox Series X.
Higher framerates, something players on PC with higher-end gear have long had access to, were one of the big selling points for the “next-gen” consoles. Recently, however, some big blockbusters have struggled to hit that mark. Gotham Knights was locked at 30fps on console, and Arkane Austin’s Redfall, an Xbox first-party console exclusive promoted with 60fps gameplay footage, won’t get a 60fps mode until sometime in the future.
But given Bethesda’s past track record with sprawling open-world RPGs at launch, a stable 30fps will probably be a pleasant surprise for most fans.
Kotaku is covering everything Summer Game Fest, from the main show on Thursday to other events happening throughout the next week. Whether you’re into larger-than-life triple-A games or intimate, offbeat indies, you can keep up with all things SGF here.
Bethesda announced that Starfield will be coming to Xbox Series X|S and PC on September 6, 2023. Microsoft will be showing off a preview at the Starfield Direct on June 11, 2023.
Easily the most anticipated title on this list, Starfield is notable for two reasons: It’s gaming’s next big sci-fi RPG epic and its the next evolution in Bethesda’s open-world formula. Bethesda is no stranger to science fiction, having a number of Fallout games under its belt. But from everything we know about Starfield right now, it’s aiming for an unprecedented scale, featuring over 1,000 worlds for you to explore.
Though we haven’t seen a whole lot of Starfield gameplay, the reveal last summer showed a bit of what we can expect. Here’s your hype fuel for Starfield before its expected release this year:
“Hard science fiction” setting with 1,000 explorable planets
A mix of “handcrafted content” and procedurally-generated environments
The classic Bethesda mix of first-person combat, exploration, and roleplaying
Bethesda
It’s hard not to get excited about a game like this. While the commonly voiced concern that such a high number of planets may mean we’re in for some serious “quantity over quality” is a fair one, I’d argue that’s always been the case with Bethesda games: Unprecedented scale, unprecedented jank. Despite all of that, Bethesda games of this sort usually cohere to form a unified experience that’s hard to get anywhere else. The question for Starfield will be: Do enough aspects of this epic space sim work well enough to create an intense level of immersion for, oh I dunno, hundreds of hours? I mean, I still don’t feel like I saw everything in Fallout 3 and 4.
