Starfield is playable this month thanks to a classic trick

Are you ready? We’re getting closer and closer to the release of Bethesda’s enormous space-exploration RPG, Starfield, and hype has truly reached fever pitch.

In case you were unaware, gamers will be able to get early access to Starfield, as long as they’re willing to pay the price. Although the game is set to release on 6 September, those who pay for the pricey Constellation Edition (for roughly £250/$300) or Premium Edition (for about £100/$100) can dive in from 1 September. If you’ve already preordered the Standard Edition, you can buy the Premium Edition Upgrade for £34.99/$34.99 for the exact same bonus.

Take a look at the story trailer for Starfield right here.

Needless to say, many Starfield super-fans have probably already gone ahead and preordered an edition of the game that lets them dive in as soon as physically possible, but it’s worth keeping in mind that a classic (and easily doable) trick will more than likely be able to be utilised to bring that release date even further forward. Slightly, anyway.

For those uninitiated, allow me to introduce you to the timezone trick. To put it simply, by going into your system settings on Xbox or PC and proclaiming that you live in New Zealand, you can essentially time travel several hours into the future. Depending on your current timezone, the effect will be more significant in some locations than others - if you already live in New Zealand, it obviously won’t make any difference.

For my fellow UK dwellers, New Zealand is 11 hours ahead, which means that (in theory) you should be able to dive into Starfield on 31 August at 1PM (UK time), as that’s the equivalent of 1 September at midnight in New Zealand.

Since Bethesda has previously clarified that “actual play time depends on purchase date and is subject to possible outages and applicable time zone differences”, we can assume that the New Zealand timezone trick will probably work here, but it’ll likely become clearer nearer to the time of release.