The Starfield gameplay trailer continues to deliver a few hints and gems with regards to the upcoming space RPG, even while Fallout and Skyrim maker Bethesda seems content to withhold any more information on its next, big project, including, by the looks of it, the possibility you might be able to play as a kind of alien.
We’ve already covered all the Starfield traits and Starfield skills that we know about so far, but this one seems more colourful, and fans are keen to discuss its possible implications. In the Traits menu, where you can choose to be an extrovert, introvert, have a starter home on the Moon, and so on, there’s also the option for “Alien DNA”. The trailer doesn’t give away a description for Alien DNA, but potentially this could give you some kind of added skill or buff – like breathing underwater, or being more resilient to harsh, irradiated environments – with a possible trade off.
Perhaps some areas of the game, in keeping with the divisions between Skyrim’s Stormcloaks and Imperials, and Fallout 3’s humans and ghouls, are reserved for humans only, and having Alien DNA as a trait makes them harder to access. Alternatively, it could be like vampirism in the Elder Scrolls series, where you gain abilities like seeing enemies easier in the dark and a speed increase, but must acquire some obscure, morally dubious resource or food type in order to survive.
One fan on Starfield’s subreddit offers a fascinating third alternative, whereby Alien DNA will serve a similar purpose to the Wild Wasteland trait from Fallout: New Vegas. With Wild Wasteland enabled, New Vegas players encounter a variety of additional events and NPCs, many of them homages to movies and TV shows – there’s a skeleton in a fridge, from which you can loot a suave adventurer hat, in reference to Indiana Jones, and a new weapon called the Holy Hand Grenade, a la Monty Python. “To be honest,” writes one Starfield fan, “when I saw the Alien DNA trait in the trailer I was thinking it could possibly be similar to Wild Wasteland, but in space”. “That would be pretty wild,” writes another, aptly.
So, despite Starfield apparently being able to induce an existential crisis, it seems possible that it will still retain some of that trademark Bethesda wackiness. If you want to know more, check out everything we know so far about the Starfield release date, as well as our guide to all the Starfield cities and Starfield character customisation options, if you want to create the perfect human-alien hybrid.