Starfield's Ship Combat is Like Gamified Star Wars

The gameplay experience that Starfield has now shown in full alongside the Xbox Showcase appears to be far more than just a simple shooter or flight simulator. This new world is an entirely immersive sim that looks like it might capture much of the look and feel of the Star Wars franchise through its ship customization and space combat.

While there are already a plethora of Star Wars licensed games to choose from on the market, most are looking to dive into a certain part of the already established world and ground the player in a story that progresses at a specific pace. The apparent difference for Starfield is that by having an open world consisting of 1,000 planets to freely explore, this places the player into the galaxy to explore, rather than into the shoes of a character to follow.

Starfield's Personalized Millennium Falcon

There's more to the grounded feel of Star Wars than sticking a player in the cockpit of an X-Wing fighter and having them fly through asteroid fields and space stations. While this certainly made for an incredible experience in Star Wars: Squadrons it handles the IP more like a backdrop to decorate around the dogfights. The aspects of the original trilogy that really make the franchise so beloved are more in the build and life on a ship like the Millennium Falcon, which Starfield's NASA-punk style seems to nail with intricate detail.

The customizable spaceship in Starfield doesn't just give players the ability to slap on whatever weapons they might need on cookie-cutter fighters. Each module has a specific use that can affect space combat and give players more options for what to do while living onboard the ship with their eclectic crew. This makes for the perfect combination of pieces that all come together to give the experience of the entire Star Wars franchise within gameplay, rather than just focusing on lightsaber duels or blaster rifles.

Complex and Layered Space Combat

Once the player's ship is fitted out to be the lived-in space their looking for, Starfield promises intense space combat that will allow players the freedom to destroy, disable, or even board enemy ships. With the freedom of space, players can even choose to run away if the task at hand feels too daunting, either by pumping up the engines and blasting at full speed through an asteroid belt or by warping to a completely different system entirely. There are tons of decisions that can be made at any moment during a ship encounter, and each one will test the player's skills as a pilot.

Having the combat center around a power allocation system, similar to games like We Need To Go Deeper, gives complete control over their ship. If a player is confident in their flying, they can temporarily sacrifice weapon damage or shield defense in order to blast forward and catch an enemy off-guard. Likewise, putting all power towards guns and shields can turn Starfield's ships into flying tanks that can punch through an enemy's defenses in a heartbeat.

The addition of pinpoint strikes that can take out specific ship systems is also right out of sci-fi media like Star Wars or Star Trek, allowing players to stop ships in their tracks and send them drifting through space. All of these layers come together to give an immersive, controlled feel to ship combat that helps the player become a sci-fi captain from their favorite media series. As director Todd Howard suggests that Starfield is five or six games in one, and the breadth of content shown in the recent direct seems to complement that by giving the player the chance to live out life across a vast system.