We are literally days away from Starfield’s official release, opening the gates for everyone on Gate Pass to enter the world. But the streamers and influencers, at least the ones who are honest, are just at the cusp of learning what Bethesda did with this world and what the limits of it actually are.
This was shared around by Peter Ovo on Twitter, but in fact, it was actually Alanah Pearce who made this startling discovery about Starfield.
But it’s best that we start where Alanah also started. A few days ago, she posted a YouTube titled “Starfield’s space exploration isn’t what you think.” In this YouTube, she explained her attempt to get to Saturn, just because.
To be more specific, she got curious about what Bethesda said about going to planets like Saturn. Apparently, Bethesda told content creators like Alanah that you won’t be able to take the time to go to a planet and land there. Now, obviously, you couldn’t land on a gas planet like Saturn anyway, but what early streamers apparently found out is if you tried hard enough you would eventually clip into an image of a planet.
Alanah later found out that her findings as she revealed in the video weren’t entirely correct either. But for the sake of establishing the sequence of events, I’ll share a link to her YouTube here.
And so we get to a Twitch stream that Alanah made later. This time, she targeted getting to the planet Pluto, from Earth. To put this in context, in terms of the real world, Saturn is 793 million miles away from earth, while Pluto is 4.67 billion miles away.
So, what Alanah did, was set a course for Pluto, and then go to sleep. The video ended up taking a little over 12 hours streaming, but roughly seven hours in, her ship actually reached the planet.
For the next five hours, while Alanah was asleep, her ship circled around the planet, waiting for her to get back on. When Alanah finally woke back up, her ship was sufficiently still powered up to allow her to try to land. Of course, as Bethesda explained, she would essentially clip into the image of Pluto. You can catch her 12 hour stream here, with the timestamp on when she actually woke back up. And here’s a timestamp around 6 hours 40 minutes in, so you can see the approach as the planet was very clearly on the horizon.
And Alanah showed us something we didn’t know Bethesda put in. Pluto was moving! Of course, the planets are known to each have their own orbit, but we didn’t know Bethesda would go through the trouble of recreating that in the game.
That Alanah would be sharing this to us is all the more surprising, as her day job is writing for Sony Santa Monica. But I suppose she had earned enough credibility as a content creator that Bethesda trusted her enough to be one of the first to get to stream the game, and make content for it. I think this whole thing proved she wasn’t going to console warrior this thing either.
We always knew Bethesda fans would prod and poke around the worlds they created to see what they could break, but it’s still pretty incredible to get there before the game was even officially out. So imagine how much we’ll get to see after everyone gets their hands on this game at launch.
Starfield will be releasing on September 6, 2023, on Xbox Series X|S and Windows via Steam. It will also be Day One on Game Pass.
