Starfield

The Monday letters page prepares to take out a mortgage on the new Elden Ring strategy guides, as one reader hopes for Gears Tactics 2.

I like the Gears franchise but wouldn’t say I love it, so didn’t know how much I’d enjoy Tactics but for me it’s the best game in the franchise. The Last Of Us Part 1 is a remake, that’s been rebuilt from the ground up – unlike Uncharted, which was a straightforward remaster. So I gave Gears Tactics a go and it was my favourite game of 2020. Plus, after a year the remake for The Last of Us Part 1 will be on sale on PSN, so it’s all good. GC: If you can name two good reasons to be against it that means you do understand the complaints? Like GC said, all the new stuff was good – like the ships and the exploration – but it almost made the game feel like a mod of Fallout, reskinning the stuff that already exists and then bolting the new stuff onto it. Even if you look at the price, no one is forced to buy it and everyone can happily play the PlayStation 4 version. I’ve got the 825GB SSD in my PlayStation 5 and by the end of the year I can have about two different games before it says memory full because of Call Of Duty updates. I hear commentators say that the game looks fine remastered on PlayStation 4, then by that conclusion the remake should not offend anyone. I didn’t think much of Redfall though and have no interest in racing games, so the number of Microsoft exclusives that interested me was fairly limited. Maybe the combat is good but it looked super generic, the way they showed it, and so did all the stuff with upgrading the skills and weapons. I think Microsoft put on a pretty good show on Sunday, considering they didn’t really have that much to talk about.

Bethesda Softworks, the game developer behind the Elder Scrolls Series and Fallout 4, has released the first-ever gameplay video for the company's new ...

Officially, Starfield is currently slated to be released at some point in 2023, with the game being delayed a year to give the developers enough time to deliver on the promises made by the game’s marketing. However, where No Man’s Sky is focused on procedurally generated space exploration, Starfield looks to be more in line with dungeon crawling, character-driven stories, weapon crafting, and realistic escapist immersion. In Starfield, Bethesda has taken what they have learned from all their previous titles, like Skyrim and the modern Fallout games, to build the company’s most ambitious game yet.

Sunday's Xbox showcase was light on news, but showed plenty of games due out in the next year – culminating in Bethesda's long-awaited space RPG Starfield.

But in the absence of any news about Fable, a new Elder Scrolls or other rumoured appearances, the star of the show was definitely Bethesda’s big new sci-fi franchise. Forza Horizon 5 is getting Hot Wheels-based new content on 19 July, and a 40th Anniversary edition of Flight Simulator will add helicopters and gliders as well as other aircraft. Starfield will also feature space exploration and space dogfighting, with players able to fully customise their craft with new weapons and shields, as well as recruiting their own crews.

Is Starfield on PS5 or PS4? Xbox and Bethesda are clear: no.

The opportunity is obviously long gone at this point, so if you want to play Starfield, Xbox and PC are your only options now. Todd Howard even talked about how limiting the platform would make a better game, stating, "you don’t ever want to leave people out, right? Minecraft didn't stop existing on anything when Mojang got bought by Microsoft. It's not a 'sorry you're never going to get to play anything on PlayStation again'". Many took that to suggest that Starfield might still have a chance on PlayStation. However Xbox marketing general manager Aaron Greenberg quickly shut that talk right down, stating that "Starfield will be launching exclusively on Xbox Series X

Yesterday, Xbox and Bethesda showed off actual Starfield gameplay for the first time, along with fresh information about how much larger the game was in ...

That’s fine, but that’s different from the potential Starfield offers with its large, but ultimately limited collection of planets and systems. Yes, it’s true that if you, a solo player, tries to explore every inch of all 1,000 planets to find something hidden and cool, you will probably die of old age before getting through a quarter of them. What this means is that yes, there will be vast regions of these planets that are autopopulated by No Man’s Sky-like mining outcroppings or wildlife, or in Starfield’s case, maybe randomized pirate outposts and things like that, who knows.