This year's Summer Game Fest season has been one of the best in recent memory, with more announcements and reveals than gamers could ever want. From the surprise announcement of a new Prince of Persia game to the first glimpse of gameplay of Star Wars Outlaws—the very first open-world game in the franchise—and a ton of excellent indie games, there's plenty to get excited about. But for most gamers, the biggest highlight of the entire Summer Game Fest season was Bethesda's Starfield and its eye-watering 45-minute gameplay deep-dive.
Aired straight after the Xbox Showcase, Starfield's gameplay deep-dive didn't hold anything back. Over the course of 45 minutes, Bethesda broke down essentially every core system in Starfield, from the game's character customization to its ground combat, characters, and story. Every major system got its time in the spotlight, and Starfield's ship combat was no exception, striking the perfect balance between an arcade shooter and a full-on space sim.
Starfield's Ship Combat Walks the Perfect Line Between Arcade and Sim
During Starfield's extensive gameplay deep-dive, Bethesda's Senior Level Designer, Zachary Wilson, directly states that Starfield's ship combat isn't just "hitting your triggers to fire your weapons", but a "complex dance", and that certainly seems to be the case. When engaging in ship combat in Starfield, players will have to micromanage the ship's various systems, including its weapons, shields, engines, and gravity drive. And if the player has multiple types of weapons on their ship, they'll have to manage each individual weapon type, such as lasers and missiles.
While in combat in Starfield, players will have a certain amount of power, presumably determined by their reactor type, and they'll have to manually decide how much energy goes into each of these systems. Putting more energy into weapons will result in more concentrated bursts that deal more damage per hit.
Ramping up the shields will mean that the ship is more protected. Increasing the power of the engines will give the ship a speed boost and improve maneuverability. And siphoning energy into the gravity drive will decrease the amount of time needed to blast out of the system, which will no doubt lead to some intense near-death moments. But with Starfield being an expansive RPG, there's even more to ship combat than that. Starfield features an impressive Skill system, boasting five separate skill trees, each with at least 16 different skills in them.
One of the Tech skill tree's abilities gives players the ability to target specific systems on an enemy ship. Similar to Fallout's VATS system, this skill allows players to directly target an enemy's weapons, engines, shields, or gravity drive, giving ship combat a lot more strategy. It seems likely that there'll be at least a few more skills related to ship combat like this in Starfield. Based on everything fans have seen so far, it seems as though Starfield is striking the perfect balance between arcade and space sim gameplay.
For those wanting to just jump into Starfield and mainly experience ground combat, they probably won't need to engage in all of these complex ship combat systems, but for those that desire a more space sim-like experience, then there's quite a bit of depth here, and that's just from what's been revealed so far. And for those that really want to live out their deepest Sci-Fi fantasies, Starfield's ship customization is offering all the depth they could ever want from a Sci-Fi RPG, with each individual module of the ship being completely customizable and upgradable, which will also undoubtedly affect ship combat.
Starfield launches September 6 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.