Top 5 features that players expect to see in Starfield

Starfield, Bethesda Game Studio's next big project, releases on November 11, 2022.

There have been no Starfield gameplay-related hints thus far, at least not directly from the developers. This being Bethesda's first brand-new intellectual property in two decades, one can guess why they are playing their cards so close to their chest.

While we can expect some actual gameplay content in the upcoming months, the semi-regular development diary teases some of their design philosophy. Based on the latest major dev diary, "Made for Wanderers," we know their design philosophy is a return to classic RPG exploration roots.

Scraping together hints and trends from other sources, the community has already deduced some of the new gameplay additions.

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5 aspects we are likely to see in Starfield

1) Disguises

Disguises have never been a mechanic in Bethesda games thus far. The closest we have gotten to the idea of a double-identity scenario is the Grey Cowl of Nocturnal, and the one standout Fallout 4 quest that has the player don the 'Silver Shroud' costume.

Yet, disguises were made into a very intuitive system for the one Fallout game that they delegated to Obisidian Studios. In the second episode of Starfield dev diaries, however, Todd Howard highlighted the idea of letting the player play a double agent role.

While it may be something as simple as stripping away the faction's ability to know the player's prior leanings, a disguise system seems to be a nod to these spy-themed roleplay opportunities.

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2) Survival Mode

A few weeks earlier, Bethesda dropped a mini-episode of their dev diary introducing the most primary form of companion the player will have, a butler-bot by the name of Vasco.

Details of Vasco's profile includes the term 'survival gear,' which may be a rather blunt teasing of survival features found in-game. Like base-building, survival was introduced to in-house Bethesda games in Fallout 4, piggybacking off of Obsidian's implementation of Hardcore Mode in Fallout: New Vegas.

Since then, 'Survival Mode' has become one of the biggest featured Creation Club integrations on Skyrim, also baked into Skyrim Anniversary Edition. Waylaid by this very natural trend, Starfield should also have the foundation of an optional survival mode, as space travel in real life is an intricate resource-management affair.

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3) A 'hangover quest' in Neon

Neon, one of the many explorable cities of the Settled Systems, is a party hub for the rich elite. Central to its economy is the corporate drug, Aurora. Aurora is to this game what Moon Sugar is to the underworld of Elder Scrolls, and from its name-dropping in Bethesda's laconic mini-diary on Neon, its presence in a psychedelic questline seems like a good possibility.

Drug-addled misadventures have become a trope in modern open-world RPGs. Examples include the iconic cannabis-immolating quest 'Kick in The Hornet's Nest' in Far Cry 3, the Kaer Morhen vodka-chugging session in The Witcher 3, or even one of Bethesda's own takes, 'A Night To Remember,' in Skyrim.

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4) Base-building

Player-made settlements was the biggest feature addition in Fallout 4, as the previous games never had any to begin with. The genesis of Bethesda's base-builder mechanics were found in the barebone customization introduced in Skyrim's first DLC, Hearthfire.

Since then, they have had two more games - Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 - to further ply their craft at an admittedly newer aspect of RPG gameplay. Starfield's setting is conducive enough to a mechanic like this.

Just based on gameplay possibilities that would naturally fall into it, we can anticipate not only base-building on the player's home turf like Starbound, but also further enterprises like setting up shop, something we have already seen in Skyrim.

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5) Manual Space Flight

Since earlier this year, the possibility of 'manual space flight' has become a community meme in the Starfield fandom. From what we know thus far, the player's personal ship is all but confirmed. The Settled Systems itself is vast enough to cover several solar systems at the very least.

Given this, one would assume manual off-the-orbit flight to be a near-critical criteria in Starfield's gameplay loop. To what capacity we will find it is debatable, however, as it could be anything from space combat to manual asteroid mining.

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