Image: Bethesda Game Studios
Bethesda also confirmed a few more details about Starfield during a Q&A session.
Bethesda Game Studios has announced that Starfield has officially gone gold. The sci-fi RPG is now likely not to budge from its September 6 release date, and anyone who pre-ordered the game can start downloading it tomorrow. Fair warning, though: it’s a hefty 140GB download.
To be fair, that 140GB of data does include thousands of planets’ worth of content. Starfield has an early access period available for anyone who’s purchased the Premium or Constellation version of the game, which begins on September 1. For those players especially, it would be convenient to have the game preloaded in advance. The game was originally listed as a 125GB download on Steam, but Xbox has recently updated its own store listing to state that it takes up 139.84GB of storage space.
139.84GB is a lot of space for a game to take up on the Xbox Series X and S’ SSD, so you might have to uninstall a few games first. On Xbox, Starfield will be available to preload from tomorrow onwards, August 17, while preloads start on August 30 for PC users. This means that if you have early access for Starfield on PC, you only have two days to preload the game.
Bethesda also hosted a Q&A session on an official Starfield Discord channel today, which the game’s subreddit then covered in length. It turned out to be pretty informative, revealing a few details we previously didn’t know - such as players being able to establish houses in the game’s many different cities by either purchasing them or completing quests. The game also has a law system to keep players in check for committing crimes like smuggling contraband across space.
Interestingly, Bethesda confirmed that a pacifist run of the game won’t be possible, but non-violent options will be available to players who want to get through the game with as little murder as possible. This involves diplomacy through dialogue or the use of non-lethal weapons. To help you out when things go south, the game also has more than 20 named NPCs scattered across space who can join your crew or become your companions. Unfortunately, those mechs we saw in Starfield’s anime series? They’re unusable in-game, so don’t expect any power armour.
Bethesda also revealed that you’ll be able to interact with and progress through the game’s many factions independently, though you will have to side against one or the other during a particular questline. You can read more about Starfield’s lore and factions here.