Starfield is a game many people are looking forward to this year, there’s no doubt about that.
It will be the first new IP coming from Bethesda Game Studios in more than two decades, a studio that’s famous for the likes of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4 (especially the former, which is one of the best-selling games of all time).
And in a recent interview, Bethesda revealed more about their upcoming sci-fi RPG, saying that the game will have a “NASA-Punk” style, as was recently reported on PC Gamer.
“We were trying to establish the overall aesthetic of this game, we sort of coined the term ‘NASA-Punk’ to describe a sci-fi universe that’s a little more grounded and relatable”, said Bethesda via lead artist Istvan Pely in an Xbox Wire interview.
Also, Starfield’s lead animator Rick Vicens explained how the “NASA-Punk” theme helped keep everyone in the “same flow”.
“It was just the perfect term for our art direction and keeping everyone in [the] same flow and working with a consistent style. For me, it just clicked”, said Vicens.
But the fact that Bethesda’s lead artist Istvan Pely also says that the team wanted a “very realistic take” might make the game more appealing, say than if Bethesda was aiming for a pure fantasy sci-fi world like that of the Mass Effect games, for instance.
Nonetheless, game director Todd Howard has described Starfield as “Skyrim in space”, and explained how space flight in the game would be like real flight in the 40’s (very dangerous that is).
Whether this realistic take makes the game better or not remains to be seen, but what’s clear is that few video game companies are as good at making role-playing games as Bethesda are.
The studio can still go wrong though, as they proved with 2018’s Fallout 76, and there’ also the fact that Starfield has been a controversial game ever since the first trailer for it was seen at E3 last year.
This is because Bethesda announced that the game would be an Xbox exclusive, and wouldn’t be available on the PS5, a logical move after the company was bought by Microsoft, but still a controversial one given the millions of PlayStation users out there.
Also curious is the fact that we haven’t seen any Starfield gameplay yet – aside from the teaser trailer shown last June, Bethesda has not seen fit to who any Starfield gameplay yet, a strange taking into account the game is scheduled to release this fall. And another trailer released last October only showed concept art too…
Nonetheless, here’s hoping that we soon get to see more of Starfield and its “NASA-Punk” style soon, as this will surely be one of the biggest video game releases in a very long time when it hits shelves in November 2021 this year.