It’s fair to say that Starfield is one of the most anticipated games and it’s not difficult to see why – Bethesda, for all its faults, has built its empire with large-scale open world RPGs. There’s a reason games like Skyrim remain popular to this day – the meticulously crafted worlds and sense of freedom capture the imagination. On paper, Starfield feels like the logical conclusion, a game that extends beyond a single planet through the reaches of space. I thought it would be fun to dive into Bethesda’s presentation and see what we can glean about the game – from basics like image quality and performance to the overall approach to tech and design.
Let’s start with rendering resolution – the trailer is presented at native 4K but shots vary in clarity. Interestingly, gameplay sequences seem to lack any sort of anti-aliasing, so you get razor-sharp edges with visible aliasing throughout. Conversely, the more cinematic shots use TAA in a manner similar to Fallout 4, which ought to be more in line with what we’ll see in the final product.
Beyond simple resolution, we can get a sense of the dev team’s design goals by looking at how Starfield handles wide open areas on-planet, interior spaces, character rendering and finally outer space. For example, in an outdoor scene, we can see the game has long distance shadowing, which is crucial for maintaining distant detail. This is one of the key problems we identified with Halo Infinite and it’s great to see that Starfield has a solution in place.
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