(bright tones) - [Jake] "Starfield"
is releasing real soon. Now, whether it turns
out to be good or bad, there's a lot to talk about. There's already a ton of
public information out there to analyze and some you
may not have even caught. There's a lot to get to know and get caught up before release, so we've got 10 categories here. Let's get started with number 10. First things first, it
cannot be understated just how big this game
is seemingly going to be. Now, from all the pre-release
information we've heard and seen, it sounds really big. The Bethesda "Fallout"
games are basically confined to a single city and the area around it. "The Elder Scrolls" games
are set in entire countries, but in "Starfield," there's, no joke, this is from the developers themselves, obviously we have to see it to believe it, but they're saying it,
approximately 1,000 planets across about 100 solar systems. It's not a full galaxy, but
it might as well be. there. That's an enormous amount of space and there's gonna be a
lot to do in most of it. The main quest line is apparently going to be long all by itself. Bethesda estimates it's
around 30 to 40 hours, which is way longer than any
of their other main game quests which, taken on their own,
are actually quite short. It's everything else that usually makes their other games so long. So that doesn't sound like
it'll be the case here. Even if you just stick to the main quest and avoid everything else, you'll probably still
get your money's worth if that number is actually accurate. The main story is about the quest to find these mysterious artifacts
with the help of a group called Constellation, who are
explorers and adventurers. The game is definitely going for a kind of classic pulp sci-fi vibe
with its story and setting. It's a kitchen sink approach to sci-fi, which will let Bethesda do
pretty much whatever they want in this new sandbox, I guess. Now, we know that there will
be four major settlements: New Atlantis, the capital
of the United Colonies and the biggest city Bethesda
apparently has ever built. Then there's Akila City,
which is the capital of the Freestar Collective,
which Bethesda describes as a loose confederation of
three distinct star systems, but let's call them what they are, sounds like space cowboys. The third city we know
about is called Neon. It's a cyberpunk-inspired city of vice, which is a stark contrast to how welcoming and nice the other two
main cities seemingly are. Now there's a lot more besides that, and there's going to be a
ton of minor settlements too. We just don't mean like generic shacks in the middle of a planet. These places are apparently
still gonna be pretty big and elaborate just from the trailers. Some of these random locations look bigger than most major cities
in other Bethesda games, but we'll talk more about planets and other settlements in a little bit. Now, next, over at number nine,
it shouldn't be a surprise that space travel is a
big part of "Starfield," but what has constantly
surprised us is just how in-depth and complex your specific
spaceship can be. This isn't just like a
3-D model you look at during loading screens between planets. You can actually pilot your ship somewhat, get into dog fights,
travel between systems, scan, and that's all here. Now, of course, the main thing is still the regular on-foot combat
that looks very reminiscent of "Fallout 4," but in space, things play out very differently. According to the developers, ship combat is intentionally
slow paced and deliberate, like these won't be big
Star Wars-esque shootouts. It's gonna feel different. That doesn't mean it's basic, though. To use weapons, shields, and your engine, you need to allocate power. There's a limited supply, so
you'll have to be selective on what you want to send power to, which is very reminiscent of
the game "Faster Than Light" So there's an element of strategy here where you need to power
up or down certain systems to deal with specific situations. Do you power up shields
to max and tank damage or do you set your engines to
maximum and play keep away? Those are the kinds of decisions it sounds like you're gonna be making
on the fly in the game world. Now, ship customization
is a huge feature here and it looks like it'll be
one of the most interesting. The game starts you off with a basic ship, but from there, you can buy prebuilt ones or design a ship from scratch yourself. Ship building is entirely modular. You can move and attach
parts however you want, as long as certain requirements are met. We're guessing that you
have to put on landing gear an exit ramp, some kind of docking system, and engine rockets, cockpit,
but it looks like there's tons of ways you can actually do that and arrange and customize your ship. Now unfortunately, there
are some downsides to ships that bring "Starfield" back to reality. You don't seamlessly
transition from the outside of your ship to the inside,
and landing on planets is a cut scene rather than
something you can do in game, which is kind of disappointing, but it's good to know
that Bethesda is trying to avoid setting up
unreasonable expectations here. At least they've been upfront. Now, space isn't just
a place where you fight and go to planets. You can also hail other ships and engage in acts of
piracy, among other things. Also, you're not flying alone. Along with 20 named
companions you can get, There are also crew
member NPCs you can hire as part of your crew, who
have unique stats and skills which can augment your own. So if you're not a very good pilot, you can hire an NPC that's an expert pilot to help improve your
ship combat abilities. The feature that we're most
interested in, of course, as we've said, is the ship
customization, though. It looks surprisingly complex
even for a Bethesda game after base-building in "Fallout 4," so we really wanna see
if it's as open-ended as it looks in the trailers. Now, next over at number
eight, let's talk planets. You know all those thousand or so planets. They're not just there for show. You can actually land on
and explore most of them. While you're in planetary orbit,
you can scan for resources and select a landing location. Yeah, this isn't "Mass Effect 2," where you gather resources from orbit. You can actually land on most planets, where you can wander
around, find hotspots, scan plant life, deal with
hostile aliens, and just explore. Planets look to vary wildly
in atmosphere and biomes. Some planets have thick forests,
some are frozen wastelands, others are just empty blasted moons. It all sounds too good to
be true, but keep in mind that most planets out
there aren't handcrafted. They're actually procedurally generated. It only makes sense considering how huge planets actually are and how many of them there are, but don't go to any random planet and expect to find something
completely unique and special if you land in any random spot. Like that's just
speculation from our part, like we doubt that Bethesda is gonna make some incredible handcrafted
thing and hide it away on a planet that, statistically, 99% of players aren't even
gonna see, but who knows? Now next, over at number
seven, here's the real reason you wanna check out all these planets. The base building is
back from "Fallout 4," but it looks much stronger here. On any random planet, you can
start building your own base that can be used as a shelter,
a place to store items, and also build machines
that can mine the planet and generate resources. Your space base needs power to function, so like "Fallout 4," this
is a more complex system than in many games, but
hopefully, the power stuff is a little less fiddly this time. One very cool new feature
is that you can go into an isometric view when base building to make it easy to snap parts together. This looks great and should
make it so much easier to build the large parts of your base. Just from being able to see it in relation to the
environment is a big help. Now, like your ship, NPCs
can also be hired here to staff your bases and run them for you, sort of like the settlement
system from "Fallout." In many ways, the base building looks like a continuation of the
ideas in their other games, but it looks like it'll
be even better here. Oh yeah, and if base
building isn't your thing, then you can still buy
houses in this game. The major cities all sound
like they have places to buy where you can rest and store your loot. Some of them even have
quests connected with them, so there's even more of an
incentive to buy houses. So it sounds like if you're
trying to live out your life in the game, Bethesda
will accommodate you. Next over at number six, let's talk factions and quest lines. Now, some of our favorite
parts of "Skyrim" are from the faction quests. They're organizations that you can join that have their own story to play through. They're smaller than the
main quest, but bigger and more elaborate than your
most random side quests, and completing them usually
gets you unique rewards. And it sounds like
"Starfield" is going all in on faction quest lines, because from all the pre-release
information we've seen and read and watched, there's
gonna be a lot of them. There's Constellation, which we're guessing
is just the main quest, but then there's also the United Colonies, the Freestar Collective, Ryugen
Industries, a corporation on Neon that the devs have
confirmed is a faction that you can join, and the Crimson Fleet. Now, the Crimson Fleet sounds
especially interesting. Is there a gang of space pirates that are a major enemy group? We're not sure if Bethesda
has straight up said that you can join them,
but they have revealed that you can infiltrate a faction
on the orders from another and that you can ultimately
decide which side to betray, which sounds a lot like
you're infiltrating the Crimson fleet, but
that's speculation for us. The last major faction is
currently the most mysterious. These are the guys called
the House of Varun, who apparently worship like a snake deity. This one Bethesda has been
very tight-lipped about. We have no idea if you
can join them or not. That leaves at least four major factions we know you can join in this
game, which is still a lot. Now over at number five, for people that bemoaned
"Fallout 4" simplification of the role-playing elements Bethesda is normally associated with, it looks like "Starfield"
will be addressing many of your complaints. There is, of course,
character customization where you can change your
appearance, but along with that, you can also give your
character optional traits that add to their history. You can choose where they grew up or even if they have living parents, which can add new wrinkles
to your experience and give you additional dialogue options. The voiced main character is out, and "Starfield" is back to
having a silent protagonist. The dialogue wheel is also gone, and it looks like the list is back. This might not seem like a major change, but for people who really want
a lot of choices in dialogue and want to know exactly what
their character is saying, this is big. That means fewer options
that are just yes, yes with snark, and no, and more actually conversation trees with multiple different
directions and outcomes. At least that's what we're hoping for. We don't know for sure, but we will say that just the
presence of a dialogue list is a step in the right direction. There's also a persuasion minigame that's sort of like "Oblivion," but it also looks a lot more clear just from the screenshots that we've seen. This is just from looking at pictures, but it seems like you get
multiple options that are green, yellow, and red. Green are easier to pull
off, red are harder, and you've got only so many
turns to convince someone before the minigame fail. The speech system is
closer to "Fallout 3." It's chance based rather
than "Fallout: New Vegas," which just required you to
have high enough speech skill and you'd always win. That means you always have a chance of winning a persuasion
check in "Starfield," but on the flip side, there's also always a slight
chance that you can fail. So good luck. Next over at number four,
"Starfield" has a skill tree but it's not quite the same as what we got back in "Fallout 4." In this game, there are
multiple skill trees, physical, social, combat,
science, and tech. Now, many of these
skills we've seen so far look like things similar to "Fallout," but there's a major wrinkle. You can only unlock the
first rank of a skill. If you want to increase its rank, then you need to complete
specific challenges. So they've made the skill
system a kind of hybrid between "Fallout 4" and
"The Elder Scrolls." In the fantasy series, you get better at things by doing them. You know, using an ax a lot
made your ax skill go up, lock picking doors and chests made your security skill
go up, things like that. Depending on how it's implemented, this actually may be an improvement or it could add some annoying busy work to ranking up your skills. It just depends on how
demanding these challenges are. Hopefully to level up your
speed, you don't have to run and collect a million Korok
seeds or something, oh my god. Personally, we do think
this might be a good change as long as they pull it off. You know, it was kind of silly
how you could just rank up a single skill right from the
start in old Bethesda games, like jumping up and down a
million times if you wanted, it almost made things too easy, so we'll see how it goes here. Now down at number three, we
did allude to this earlier, but "Starfield" doesn't force you to be a goodie two shoes space explorer. You could be a full-blown
space criminal if you want. That means you can
attack civilian vessels, pirate cargo shipments,
steal from other ships, even steal entire other
ships to add to your fleet. You can also smuggle
illegal goods for money. Smuggling can be tough because
if you've got illegal goods on your ship like human organs, then your ship is scanned
by the authorities and you'll get caught, fined,
and possibly thrown into jail. There are ways around the scans though. You can buy special ship modules that can be used to hide things. I bet these things can't just
be bought anywhere though. Probably a lot harder to find. So there's actually a
lot to do in "Starfield" if you want to be more of a bad guy, and we are all for that. Now, down to number two, this might be their least buggy game yet. Now take this one with a grain of salt because Bethesda games are
pretty well known at this point for launching in a buggy state, but head of Microsoft
Game Studios, Matt Booty, has come out and said that
if Starfield shipped today, this would have the fewest
bugs any Bethesda game has ever shipped with,
which is a bold claim, but one that we're at least
a little inclined to believe. We know the game has
seen some large delays from its initial release
date of November, 2022, and a big reason they've always given for pushing the game back
was for polish reasons. Now that Bethesda is owned by Microsoft and is now an Xbox console exclusive, there's even more pressure on
the game to not only be good, but to break the stigma that
Bethesda games are buggy. Yeah, we know, Todd Howard also said that "Fallout 76" just works and that game was a pretty
rough mess for a while. - It doesn't just work. - [Jake] But in this case,
we're at the very least just hoping "Starfield" will be better. We don't think it'll be perfect, but you know, hopefully
it's not a disaster. I know we're probably gonna
have to eat these words when it finally launches, but we're just hoping for the best. The more games that release
in a good state, the better. Now down to number one, some housekeeping and all that stuff you gotta know, "Starfield" is almost upon us and the game is releasing
September 6th for Xbox Series X and S and PC through the
Microsoft store and Steam. Microsoft is real serious about this one. It's going to be on Game
Pass day one, which is big. We've gotten a lot of
exclusives on Game Pass before, but nothing as big as "Starfield." And we're not just talking
big in terms of hype. We're talking size. It's 139.84 gigs, so be
sure to clear up some space on your hard drive 'cause
you're gonna need it. Now, September 6th may
be the real release date, but for people who buy
the premium edition, you get early access to the game and can start playing it five days earlier than everyone else on September 1st. We'll leave it up to you to do the cost-benefit
analysis on that one. Everybody's different, but that's everything
you really need to know, everything to get caught up on, but we got a bonus one for you. We wanted to highlight that power at the end of the gameplay deep dive video in that official gameplay
deep dive trailer thing. You can look it up on YouTube
at 41 minutes, 43 seconds. What was that? It looks like you hold up your hand and cause all the enemies
to start floating, or are there special powers
to unlock in this game? Do you get some kind of space magic as part of the main quest? We don't know what's
going on, but it seems like a cool tease and we
knew we had to mention it. Maybe they'll bring back fus ro dah, but in space, who knows? But that's everything you
need to know about "Starfield" before you get your hands on
it or before release, whatever. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for a "Before You Buy" video, because we will be coming out with one. We will be playing the game,
showing you guys gameplay, letting you know what we think, but for now, this is all the
public info you gotta know. So let us know what you
think about this game. What are your expectations? What are your hopes and dreams? Have you written off Bethesda? Do you love Bethesda? Let's talk anything down in the comments. If you like this video and
maybe learned something, clicking the like button helps us out. Thank you and subscribe if you're new because we put out
videos every single day, but as always, thanks for watching and we'll see you guys next time.
