If you haven’t heard by now, we’ve got a brand new Starfield release date, and it confirms that Bethesda’s upcoming RPG will unfortunately be hit with another delay. The news came via a new Starfield trailer, and while most of the attention will have been on that all important date, there’s actually a lot of interesting stuff hiding within it.
The trailer begins with a cinematic, story teaser segment and ends with game director Todd Howard giving a message to fans, all while a team of Bethesda employees play a build of Starfield behind him. This part is also spliced with shots of other developers hard at work on the game. Throughout the entire 2 minutes and 40 seconds, there are actually a fair few bits of new info that the community and us here at The Loadout have spotted, so here’s a roundup of everything we saw or heard.
Let’s start with that cinematic opening, which seems to focus heavily on the mysteries that Constellation is chasing across Starfield’s galaxy. An unknown speaker talks of something called The Eye, which appears to be some kind of sensor for detecting “anomalies”.
“The Eye’s showing signs of another of those big anomalies – maybe you catch a smile and uncover the source of it all,” the speaker seems to say, over the top of some rousing shots of a space station and a desolate moon or planet.
We then see more of one of these mysterious, spinning structures that we saw during last summer’s Starfield showcase, but in much more detail. It also appears to be housed inside some kind of ancient ruins or temple – a similar temple can be briefly seen in last June’s showcase as well. We’re not sure if this is stylised for the trailer, but the spinning structure also seems to suspend your character in midair.
This shot then transitions into a view of a galaxy, which is then framed to look like an actual eye. Maybe this instrument is The Eye mentioned? At the moment, all we can do is speculate.
Some more solid info though comes in the latter half of the trailer.
Behind Howard, a team of devs playing Starfield look to be navigating Mars. Not only is the planet red, dusty, and rocky, but at one point a message pops up on screen that we believe reads: ‘Mars Mech Factory’. This is likely a ‘new location discovered’ message, and it also hints at what might be going down on Mars. Late last year we learned that Mars is colonised and is home to one of the main Starfield cities, Cydonia, so this all lines up.
We also see in various gameplay snippets the names of some new Starfield planets, and while some are slightly blurry and hard to read: Cassiopeia I, Tau Ceti VIII-B, Nesoi, and Charybdis III.
So far, we only know the identity of one of the Starfield companions for definite, and that’s VASCO the robot. However, as was spotted by ‘Auziak’ on Reddit, a very brief snippet of the Mars gameplay behind Todd Howard appears to show a human companion running towards the main player from their docked ship. While it was always very likely that we’d get at least one human as a potential companion, we’ve now seemingly got the proof.
We also get a look at two new types of creature that we can encounter in Starfield. The most obvious is the slightly terrifying beast that has a lamprey-style mouth full of teeth, which appears to be called a Hunting Maggotman, judging by its enemy indicator. There were some on The Loadout team that read it as Hunting Maggotmaw, but either way, there’s a big scary maggot-like creature with legs that looks like a suitable character for any of the best Xbox horror games.
You can also spot some dinosaur-esque creatures at one point in the trailer. There is a famous shot from last year’s showcase where we see a massive, armoured, dinosaur-like creature towering over our character, but these appear different. They’re more akin to a long-necked dinosaur like a diplodocus.
The final big revelation comes from a brief shot of a dev inside Starfield’s inventory menu, who is changing their character’s helmet. As well as a lot of the usual Bethesda-y bits like total inventory weight, you can see in the top-right corner a display of various stat groups and environmental effects.
Along the top row appears to be the three core stats that armour pieces can affect: Phys (which is 99.9% sent referring to ‘physical’), Engy (gotta be ‘energy’, right?), and EM, which we theorise is referring to electromagnetic waves and the resistance you have to those. Then below that are four other modifiers: thermal, airborne, corrosive, and radiation. We’re not quite sure how these marry up to three main stats above, but we’ll likely find out more on this come the Starfield Direct release date.
So, not a bad haul of secrets and new info for a 2:40 trailer. Lord knows how much the upcoming showcase will reveal. In the meantime, why not read up on some of the Starfield weapons that have been spotted so far, and some of the Starfield skills that will give you complete control of your character as you explore the depths of space.