Starfield spaceflight is now officially a thing... or at least as official as it gets until it comes straight from Todd Howard's mouth. Basically, Hevy008 leaked a whole bunch of information on the upcoming Bethesda title because he doesn't understand how NDA's work, thinking that once he left Bethesda he was free to spill the beans. That definitely isn't the case, and as of today the account and all Hevy008's comments have been nuked from the site, along with his account, presumably when he realized the amount of legal trouble he could be in. Despite that, the internet never forgets, and the information he did leak was fairly revealing:
It was cool solid place to work, very secure. The engine is a piece of crap tho. Todd is a charismatic guy for sure. Starfield is looking good, weekly Thursday playtest since the beginning of the year, more and more stuff coming online. Shooting feels alright, flying is terrible atm imo just not fun for me. Lightning and stuff is looking better and better, tho it's not at the level of HFW or anything like that but still a good looking game. In terms of if it will ship on time, well they will try that's for sure, they'll cut what they did to etc, they have an overabundance of content, probably too much, so that's no the issue, finding the fun and of course bug fixing is the big thing. It's a sexy date tho and you only get one of those, beta is this summer, that's when the picture will become truly clear.
That's a lot of information to reveal in one post, but the biggest is Starfield spaceflight, which is honestly pretty neat. After all, it's a space exploration game, so having Starfield spaceflight is a no-brainer. Still, it was something that was unconfirmed up till now, and past space RPGs have generally left space flight to the computer. They are striving to hit what Hevy calls a 'sexy' release date, with the beta coming this summer. Given that they have apparently made an 'overabundance of content' some cuts will likely be needed to hit the deadline but could give the game a slightly leaner content profile by cutting tasks that weren't fun to do.
Regarding the engine being "a piece of crap", Hevy008 explained that he was commenting from a developer usability standpoint and not from a capability standpoint, after various users expressed concern about what it could mean for the game if the engine was subpar. Starfield is on a new engine, although it likely contains some legacy elements.
Jason Schrier also confirmed that Hevy008 was legit. He can't confirm everything Hevy008 has said, but that they definitely were a character artist at Bethesda whose last day was on Friday. That's good to know, considering Schrier's track record. We'll have to see how much of Hevy008's leaks are real, but right now they seem pretty convincing. There's even some talk about Spyteam being worked on before Starfield, which was apparently "a pet project of Todd's and was just being prototyped." There's been a trademark application for it, so we'll possibly learn more about Spyteam after Starfield.
For more information on Starfield, Bethesda, and everything in between, stay tuned to TechRaptor.
