'Starfield' Will Use One Of The Elder Scrolls' Forgotten Features

There was a whole load of exciting stuff shown off during last night’s Xbox & Bethesda not-actually-E3 showcase, from Diablo IV to, at long last, a new trailer for the highly anticipated Hollow Knight Silksong, which I’m not sure anyone was expecting from this particular presentation (not that we’re complaining, of course). 

There’s no doubt though that the highlight of the show for many people out there was the reveal of Starfield’s gameplay. Back in March, starved of news, we saw what we thought might have been a few seconds of gameplay - but now it’s actually here, and it’s glorious. It’s also a lot less “Skyrim in space” and a lot more “No Man’s Skyrim”, and whether you think that’s a good thing or not is solely up to you.

Feast your eyes on the gameplay reveal for Starfield right here.

Beyond the sheer size of the game, which is now confirmed to boast over 1,000 explorable planets from 100 star systems (please bear in mind here it was previously rumoured that some of these individual planets will be Skyrim-sized), it also seems that Starfield is bringing back an old feature from an early Elder Scrolls game which fans could have easily forgotten about. As reported by PCGamesN, you’ll be able to start your space adventures already in huge amounts of debt. Fun!

This feature wasn’t actually discussed by Bethesda, but you can spot it for yourself during the footage showing the character creation screen - when selecting your character’s background traits, one of the options which is named “starter home” generously awards you with a 50,000 credit mortgage (see the video further above). Obviously, this is far from the first game in history to introduce debt and home-owning repayments (Animal Crossing has been doing that since the series’ inception), but Bethesda previously introduced this to their 1996 release, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Whether this feature is a small nod to this release is another matter, but it’s cool (not that I particularly fancy commencing my space adventures with -50,000 credits to my name). 

Thanks to its delay, Starfield is going to be releasing sometime in 2023, and while that might be further away than we originally thought, it’ll hopefully be worth the wait.