It Sounds Like You Can Steal Other People's Spaceships In Starfield

Bethesda role-playing games put a big premium on player choice and agency, focusing on providing lots of different ways for you to solve problems, complete quests, or otherwise interact with the world. In Starfield, venturing through the galaxy to uncover the game's story and explore the more than 1,000 planets it contains will require a spaceship. Good news, though: If you don't feel like building one, it sounds like you can steal one.

During Microsoft's Extended Xbox/Bethesda Showcase event, Pete Hines, Bethesda's senior vice president of global marketing and communications, spent some time talking about all the different stuff you can get up to as you work your way through the vast galaxy of Starfield. As with other Bethesda games, the studio wants players to have opportunities to approach their missions or encounters in a variety of ways. Hines talked about the studio hoping to create situations in which players can talk to each other about how they might have dealt with a mission or encounter, and in sharing their experiences, realize there are options in the game they might not have considered.

The example Hines used for the solution for one hypothetical mission might be to just storm an enemy ship, shoot its entire crew, hop into the cockpit, and fly off into the sunset. He didn't provide any tangible details but emphasized that "you can do anything" in Starfield. So it sounds like that might include stealing pirate ships while you're working through the story or just wandering the galaxy.

Ships are a big part of Starfield, from the sounds of things, and Hines said you can spend hours on the portion of the game dedicated to shipbuilding.

"Every ship is customizable to the Nth degree, and not just cosmetically," he said. "It goes much deeper than that, in terms of what kinds of shields you have, what kinds of weapons you have--what kind of ship are you building, and what do you want it to be good at, what tradeoffs are you willing to make, or not."

Constructing a ship isn't cheap, either, and we've seen that you'll spend time mining resources in Starfield, ostensibly to be able to build things like spacecraft and outposts. Hines said you can make a lot of choices in building your interstellar vehicle, like whether to level up certain skills that'll help you then construct the kind of ship you want, or hunt down merchants from whom you can buy what you need.

If you don't feel like doing all of that, though, it sounds like you might have the option to skip all the crafting and customization and just snag a ship from some unsuspecting space pirate who should have known better than to cross you.