Image: Bethesda
Bethesda’s new anime series suggests that we’ll get to pilot mechs in Starfield.
Bethesda has already shown us all the gameplay we need to see from Starfield, so it’s taking a different route to market the game leading up to its September release date. The developer has released an animated anthology series called The Settled System online, diving into the daily life of people living in Starfield’s three biggest cities.
Watch the first short below, titled ‘Supra Et Ultra’:
While these shorts don’t give us any new gameplay, we do get to learn a lot about Starfield’s Settled Systems and how its United Colonies work. In the short above, we see a courier pilot working hard to live in one of the Settled Systems’ most desirable locations: the city of New Atlantis. After working his way up to the elite members of its UC Vanguard however, he realises that what he really wants is a life spent adventuring in space - which is coincidentally, what you’ll be doing in Starfield. Maybe you’ll run into one another?
Another short, Where Hope is Built, reveals something very interesting: this universe has mechs! In that short, we see an Akila City orphan of the Colony Wars trying to repair a ship and make her way to the stars - a recurring theme in these shorts. A brief flashback to the Colony Wars reveals humans in mechs firing bullets and missiles at one another, subsequently creating the orphan we see in the short. Fortunately, the orphan eventually manages to repair her ship and take to the skies.
It’s easy to imagine that, given the vastness of Starfield, we’ll eventually run into the characters featured in these shorts during our journey across space. We’ll certainly explore these cities and learn more about events like the Colony Wars, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually got to pilot mechs as well. Bethesda has experience with mech-like outfits (Fallout’s Power Armour), so why not give the player a few mechs to play around with later in the story?
The final short, The Hand That Feeds, takes place in the Ocean Planet pleasure city of Neon, a flashy and colourful city that wouldn’t look out of place in Cyberpunk 2077. The short follows two street rats robbing the wealthy visitors of Neon, before one of them turns on the other when they come across an opportunity to be recruited by the all-seeing Ryujin Industries. Criminals climbing the corporate ladder? That’s certainly Cyberpunk-adjacent.
If nothing else, these shorts show us that Starfield has plenty of different locations and characters to explore and meet throughout the campaign - and don’t forget: they’re scattered across thousands of planets! Some are sure to be more relevant to the story than the rest, but there’s a lot of variety in these shorts already.
Starfield launches on September 6, 2023. Baldur’s Gate 3 comes out on the same day on PlayStation consoles.
