Ten years in the making, Starfield’s celestial journey is a rare moment in the video game industry. Developed by Bethesda Game Studios, the game has a campaign with 1,000 explorable planets. The more you play the game, there is more to like about it. There are unpredictable systems that make the game memorable.

Coming on Windows and Xbox Series X/S on September 6, the gameplay involves joining a mining operation in the year 2330 on an uninhabitable planet where you come across an unknown space material referred to as Artifact. This is at a time when humankind has colonised the galaxy. And then the action picks up. You shoot a few pirates, learn to fly a spaceship and meet explorers who are part of a group called The Constellation, looking to find more Artifacts like the one you found.

Video game developer Bethesda is known for titles like Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. The game is also coming at a time when Microsoft needs it the most because Xbox has to prove that it can offer as many hits as console rivals Sony and Nintendo. Further, Microsoft has been on a recent spending spree, acquiring Bethesda’s parent company in 2020-21 and agreeing to purchase Activision Blizzard in 2022, a $69 billion deal, which is being challenged by regulators.

Being set in the 24th century, Starfield had to work on how players would navigate from planet to planet. It is an era when lightspeed travel wins over Uber. Players work with a series of maps and locations. As expected, there will be gameplay sequences that change the scenery from orbit to surface. There is a core cast of characters in Constellation and they hope to find more Artifacts and answer humanity’s oldest questions.

The challenge lies in developing scenarios that are as wild as our idea of space and the universe. “All of us, I think, at some point look to the sky and say, ‘Man, I wonder what it would be like to blast off and land on the moon?’ or ‘I wonder what would be beyond that?’ or ‘What’s in that star?’ or ‘Is there life out there?’” Todd Howard, the executive producer of Bethesda, has said in an interview. “We needed the scale to have that feeling. We could have made a game where there are four cities and four planets. But that would not have the same feeling of being this explorer.”

The game promises a lot of trippy moments like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The interactions with members of the Constellation will also be quite memorable, as the team has quite a range of personalities, a theologian to a cowboy. All that the group knows is that Artifacts are important and it’s by playing the game that you figure out what they are.

The game found inspiration in movies and television shows like Interstellar, Battlestar Galactica and The Martian as well as from organisations like NASA and SpaceX. Though the main story can be completed in about 30 hours but players can also spend hundreds of hours customising spaceships, exploring planets and fighting pirates.

The New York Times reports that to get the element of realism correct, engineers toured NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, which Ashley Cheng, Bethesda’s managing director, said helped inspire Starfield’s realistic simulation of the galaxy — down to how quickly a planet rotates around its axis.

The Starfield planets cover a variety of environmental conditions; some are temperate and filled with fauna and flora, while others are in a deep freeze that cannot be landed on. And then there are those that have chemical water and low gravity.

In case you play the game on a Windows desktop, you don’t need to worry. AMD has worked with Bethesda Game Studios throughout the game’s development to ensure a visually stunning and immersive next-gen experience across Bethesda’s most ambitious adventure yet. With built-in optimisations for Ryzen 7000 Series processors and Radeon RX 7000 Series graphics cards, AMD gamers can enjoy fluid gameplay and incredible image quality.

Starfield releases on September 6; now in early access mode