Armed for Battle: Enhanced Powers, Custom Weapons, and Game-changing Mods

A Starfield Ultimate Preview Series – Part 5

If you’re just jumping into our Ultimate Preview Series, we’d advise you read our previous articles in the series if you’d like a better understanding of where your journey begins.

Part 1 – Your Journey Begins Here

Part 2 – A Cosmic Journey of Love, Customization, and Companionship Among the Stars

Part 3 – The Ultimate Planetary Odyssey: 1000+ Planets, Thriving Cities, and Personal Outposts

Part 4 – From Novice to Legend: Chart Your Path with Backgrounds, Traits, And Epic Character Progression

Combat Basics

For most of you, there may not be a lot of surprises here. What the Bethesda team has shown off is a rather straight-forward combat system, and more or less what we’ve come to expect from their games. 

That being said we have to start by stating what the developers made clear in the June 2023 Starfield direct, that combat was built from the ground up, so it would hopefully feel like a much different experience, and you can actually see a good deal of that in the gameplay footage. Things like ADS feel snappier, and there is a lot of that crispness that we often associate with modern shooters. That being said there are only a handful of people that have actually gone hands-on with the game so until we actually get to test out the action, we’re just speculating based on what we’ve seen.

Differentiators

If we look at Starfield as a modern shooter, that’s already a step in the right direction because games like Fallout were built on an old engine and the combat felt outdated. If you factor in the few things that make Starfield its own unique game, well then things start to get interesting. What I’m talking about are 3 known systems the team has revealed or teased already. 

First up is Jet Boost or the ability to use your jetpack to hover above the battlefield. We’ve seen this shown off on multiple occasions and while not a totally new idea, it’s fresh for Bethesda and it’s a unique enough spin on traditional FPS combat that many will find it enjoyable.

Second is the impact of gravity in the game, and how weapons factor into that equation. For example, in Zero G’s ballistic weapons will push the player back, whereas energy weapons won’t. With over 1000 planets to explore and an insane number of points of interest to clear out how could you not expect to fight in Zero G’s. Again, this is a unique enough experience that it’s definitely part of the fun factor.

Finally, we have to talk about powers. What they are, how we obtain them, how often we actually get to use them, well we know none of those answers. But the team teased something big, and as we all know Bethesda is no stranger to supernatural abilities.

All three systems will come to differentiate Starfield from other modern RPGs, but that’s really the icing on the cake. To better understand the ins and outs of combat we have to really look deeper, at what is arguably the most important aspect of the action, weapons. 

Weapon Types

Where I think we gain the most insight is actually the combat skill tree, and while we don’t know what each skill is or does, we can get a sense for how it’ll shape combat just based on the icons. If we only look at gun-related icons we can see that the following are shown in some capacity:

It might not correlate to a direct damage increase with each type of weapon but there’s a good chance if the team is showing off the type of gun, it’s going to be usable.

What we do know for certain is that weapons will all fall into one of three classifications:

And I think it’s pretty safe to assume those types will be a factor when considering how effective a weapon is against a certain type of enemy and example being unarmored, armorer, or even possibly, alien.

What I’m worried hasn’t been improved too much is melee combat. We’ve only seen the Combat Knife and Rescue Axe in action but by all accounts, things seem rather basic with a simple blocking system and an attack chain that strings together just a few varying animations. I’ll reserve full judgment until I go hands-on, but I think the writings on the wall that the clear focus from the developers was on the gunplay.

Let’s take a look at some of the interesting weapons already revealed by the team, and we are going to focus on special “named” weapons, those that we believe are either the baseline weapon or a unique pickup that players get either through special points of interest or crafting.

Beowulf – Common ballistics based rifle

Brawler’s Equinox – Electromagnetic laser rifle. This gun also features a unique effect, dealing double damage when gun bashing

Coachman– Common ballistics shotgun

Drum Beat – common ballistics rifle

Ember – energy-based laser pistol

Eternity’s Gate – Ballistics and energy particle beam rifle. This weapon has a lot of really interesting things to call out including its unique effect, Handloading. Volatile rounds are designed to pack a bigger punch but aren’t as stable and can fail on occasion. A pretty interesting effect with a potentially deadly downside

Experiment A-7 – Rare ballistics shotgun. This weapon has a solid unique effect granting it +30% more damage against aliens

We have seen a few other weapons that fall more in line with traditional Bethesda naming like the Modified Calibrated Razorback which gives you an idea of the quality and pre-existing mods on the weapon.

Weapon Mods

And speaking of mods, what’s a good RPG without the ability to finely tune your weapon to be the ultimate alien-killing tool of destruction. From the menu you’ll notice that each gun has the potential for mods. These are attachments that can be purchased, crafted, or looted, and then applied to the appropriate weapon. 

In the one instance we’ve seen of this user interface we saw a player manipulate the Drum Beat rifle. Here we’re able to see 5 of the 7 moddable components:

• The receiver
• Internal
• Optic
• Magazine and Battery
• Muzzle

As we’ve come to expect from this type of system by changing components the properties of the weapon change with variations happening across the board depending on the mod you attach. Two of the more interesting modifications are thermal optics and explosive rounds. The optic mod completely changes your sight picture, something that’ll actually be relevant, especially for snipers, given the nature of weather and lighting across the various planets. As the name suggests the ammo mod changes the ammo type, and in the June Starfield direct we got to see what an explosive-round weapon looks like in action

All of these mods will require components to craft, and while there are sure to be dozens of crafting reagents, we did get a peek at a few, such as:

• Adhesive
• Tetraflouride
• Lead
• Tungesten
• And Sealant

I should also point out that some of those required reagents are elements that you’ll collect via your outpost or by harvesting them directly from deposits found on specific planets, so you see how things all come full circle.

The Bottom Line

Whether you choose to punch, sneak, or blast your way through Starfield there’s no escaping combat and at some point, you’ll be faced with the tough choice: do you run…or do you fight. Hopefully this gives you some insight into the highly customizable world of Starfield’s combat systems.