Starfield's Crafting And Modding Looks Wildly Varied

Starfield is Xbox's biggest game this fall, and Microsoft took the time to highlight it with its own separate Starfield Direct presentation. The lengthy deep dive took a closer look at almost every aspect of the game, and took an especially detailed focus on combat, including how you'll craft and mod weapons to deal with enemies.

The presentation showed a variety of ways you can outfit your gear to fit the situation or your combat style. Those include modifying your weapons with larger magazines or different grips or barrels to create the right feel and flow. The customization is modular, letting you swap individual parts. A pistol was shown with a silencer, laser sight, and holographic sight options. The suppressor is more suited for a stealthy play style, or you can use explosive rounds if you're in a louder mood. Sometimes you'll need to swap your gear to suit a mission based on the environment, as we saw a look at taking out a distant enemy with a sniper rifle in a hazy fog.

Bethesda boasted that it's totally overhauled its combat for Starfield, with more fluid animations. You also have more mobility, thanks in part to your jet pack. You have to contend with some of the realities of outer space, like being pushed back if you fire a ballistic weapon in a zero-G environment.

Finally, the closer look gave us an idea of the variety of enemy types we'll encounter in Starfield. While most of the combat was against various factions of humanoid enemies--most wearing space suits--we also saw combat against robots and native alien creatures.

The Starfield presentation also shared details on aspects like space combat, factions, and even the return of a fan-favorite Oblivion meme.