➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Beyond Skyrim

• 🤩 Starfield is more than just a reskinned Skyrim, according to the head of Xbox Game Studios

• 🎙 They recently discussed their expectations of the upcoming RPG

• 🤯 And emphasized that Starfield will expand beyond the core Bethesda formula

• 📅 Now all we need is a release date

Xbox wants you to know that Starfield isn’t, actually, just a reskinned version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Developer Bethesda has often drawn comparisons between their upcoming sci-fi RPG and the 2011 fantasy mega-hit, with Todd Howard previously describing Starfield as “Skyrim in space” to The Washington Post. Most fans have been excited at the prospect of reliving the glory days of The Elder Scrolls, only with more spacesuits, plasma rifles, and faster-than-light travel.

But during a recent appearance on Skill Up’s Friends Per Second podcast, head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty distanced himself from that idea, emphasizing that Starfield will try to iterate on the core Bethesda formula rather than replicate it wholesale.

"Having had the chance over the last year and a half or so to spend more time with Todd Howard and see how he works and see what he brings to game design, I'm confident that he's not going to sit still on what was built before – it's just not his approach to come in and reskin something.” Booty said.

“There's going to be an awful lot of things that move forward with this game,” he added, pointing to Starfield’s space combat, ship building, and planetary exploration.

“I think there's going to be an awful lot of new stuff that Bethesda fans and Todd Howard fans have not seen.”

A lot of those new mechanics were shown in Starfield’s first gameplay trailer released earlier this year. The ship-building system will let you customize the layout of your interstellar ride using a variety of modules, not only changing its look but also its stats. You’ll then be able to take direct control of the ship to steer it around the vacuum of space, land on other planets, and fight other vessels in dogfights.

But there’ll also be a lot of continuity between Starfield and past Bethesda titles. The dialogue system looks almost identical, character creation is based on a similar background system, and even the character animations look stilted.

As for Starfield’s release date, Booty left us none the wiser. After delaying the game from its original November 11 launch, Microsoft said we can now expect it in the first half of 2023. Bethesda will be expecting Starfield to make a huge splash, but its place on our list of the best Xbox Series X games isn’t guaranteed. If it really does take Skyrim to new horizons, it might just stand a chance.

You can check out all the Xbox games on the way this year and next with our Xbox Series X 2022 games list.