You could completely explore a huge sandbox with over 1000 planets.
You walk into a store and there's a bunch of weapons, etc. You could pick those up. You could steal them and create chaos.
You could spend thousands of hours doing nothing but ship building.
You could also be about exploring every planet.
You could just play the main story and be like, "I wanna kind of experience that I'm guided through so I kinda get to see stuff." Some folks want a little bit of a guided path to understand where the fun is.
Branching quests (or different paths in finishing a quest at least). You could talk to everybody about what you did and you were like "wait I did that quest, but I did this completely different thing." You start to appreciate all of the choices you could've made you didn't even realize were an option.
You could steal a ship, shoot all the crew members, and take off.
Different skills that determine how good you are in combat, different weapons, and ship combat all paint the picture of just how deep the rabbit hole (of combat mechanics) goes.
Every ship is customizable to the nth degree. Not just cosmetically, it goes much deeper than that. You could change what kind of shields you have and what kind of weapons you have. What do you want your ship to be good at? What trade-offs are you willing to make?
Ship upgrades can be obtained through getting resources and levelling up certain skills. Parts could also be bought from people with money.
Confirms that procedural generation played a big role in Starfield. (landscapes especially)
They have done more hand-crafting in Starfield content-wise than any other game they've done.
Wants space combat to be unique from other space sims and shooters.
Ship has various power systems. You can put power into 3 different weapon systems, engines, shield, etc.
The Grav drive is what lets you jump or get out of some situations (consumes power).
Kept the pace for dogfighting fairly slow. Comparable to Mech Warrior in terms of systems and power. (not a twitchy dogfighter)
Can dock with other ships. You can board them, disable them, and even steal them.
There are quests and dialogues in space, star stations you can visit, smuggling, pirates, etc.
There are about 20 character backgrounds (as of the current build). Think of them as classes with starting skills. Some dialogues revolve around your background.
200K lines of dialogue
There are a few "Step out" moments given the scale of the game. The early ones are the one they spent time on to make sure they're impactful.
There are 4 main cities in the game.
New Atlantis is the biggest city in the game and the biggest BGS has ever built.
New Atlantis has all the services you could expect. Ship maintenance, factions, Constellation headquarters.
Main quest goes through Constellation.
"Old Earth Artifacts" and other unknown artifacts are what Constellation is looking for. (most likely the ones shown in the gameplay reveal)
The quest you start on revolves around the origins of these unknown artifacts.
Main Quest in Starfield is a little bit longer (20% more) than their past titles.
"If we aimed for let's say a 25 hour main quest for our previous ones, this one may be in the 30's or 40's."
Thinks this game is a dream for the modding community.
No manual landing. You can't fly straight down to the planet. The on surface is one reality and space is another.
