Highlights
- Starfield offers players an immersive world with impressive character creation and customization options, allowing them to craft their own story in the stars. That immersion also extends to major purchases like homes.
- The game reintroduces the banking and loan system from The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, where players can take out loans to finance the purchase of a home, complete with mortgage payments. However, the mortgage must be paid all at once in Starfield.
- Owning a home in Starfield is optional, but adds a sense of luxury and responsibility to the gameplay, reflecting the real-world experience of homeownership and contributing to the game's immersive nature.
Aside from being an incredibly feature-rich and polished RPG, Starfield may actually present players with the most immersive world crafted by Bethesda Games to-date. This is no small feat considering the pedigree of the studio and the many worlds crafted under its guiding hand that have entertained players for thousands of hours. Between the ability to craft an avatar with one of the most impressive character creation tools and then the option to customize that character's background from a series of traits, Starfield aims to let players pen their own story in the stars. One of these traits includes owning a beautiful home on a peaceful moon, and in doing so brings back a Bethesda Games feature not seen since The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall.
Starfield reintroduces the notorious banking and loan system from Daggerfall that allows players to take out vast sums of money in order to finance a home. While it's certainly not a requirement in the game given how much freedom the player has to spend most of their time in their spaceship of choice, owning a home exists as a new option in Starfield that mimics the real thing, complete with having to pay a mortgage. If players are planning to begin the game with the Dream Home trait, there are some important things to know about the banking and loan system in Starfield.
How Starfield's Approach to Banking Differs from Daggerfall
Aside from their first appearance in The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, banks have also returned as part of The Elder Scrolls Online, though their functionality differs from Daggerfall. The player character in Daggerfall, The Agent, has several different uses for banks, but the primary one is to take out a loan. Players can take out a loan of up to 1.1 million gold, but loans must be repaid within a year and accrue interest at a rate of 10%. It's also worth noting that the most common reason to need a loan, purchasing a home in Daggerfall, comes with a hefty cost. The cheapest dwellings still sit around the 300,000 gold mark.
In contrast, players cannot simply take out a loan in Starfield. Sure, banks exist, but their functionality is purely centered around the purchase of a home and players cannot take advantage of a low-interest loan of credits to get on their feet in the game's early hours. Even the act of financing a home is limited to the 'Dream Home' trait, as otherwise players are simply expected to shore up the necessary credits for the purchase of a permanent dwelling - something that makes the 250,000 credit apartment in Neon seem slightly less appealing.
What to Know About the Dream Home Trait
In the event that players are dead-set on owning a permanent dwelling in the Settled Systems, Starfield has them covered. Thanks to the 'Dream Home' trait selectable during character creation, players can start the game with a strikingly beautiful custom home built on a small moon. Of course, this dream home also comes with the caveat of a 150,000 credit mortgage. And unlike real-world mortgages, the loan for the dream home needs to be paid to GalBank in full rather than in monthly installments. The penalty for refusing to pay this mortgage is either foreclosure on the home or a weekly 500 credit fee to enter the premises.
Determining whether the purchase of a home is worth it in the context of Starfield's world is entirely up to the discretion of the player. Sure, players can completely ignore the act of homeownership and spend their time taking to the skies in a spaceship of their choosing or design, but some may wish to have the luxury of a permanent domicile in which to kick up their feet and reflect on their journey. Since owning a home comes with the responsibility of paying a mortgage in the real world, it's hard to argue against the feature's inclusion in Starfield being yet another example of the game's successful attempts at immersion.
Starfield is available now for PC and Xbox Series X/S.