The Morning After: An extended look at Bethesda’s space epic, ‘Starfield’

It’s early Monday morning for most of you, but the work week started early for Engadget, with Xbox’s big Summer Game Fest showing. Given how many game studios Microsoft now has for its consoles and game streaming service, we were expecting a whole bunch of announcements, trailers and things to have strong opinions on.

There were plenty of familiar Xbox reveals — more Forza announcements, for one — as well as major updates from Blizzard Activision (soon to be part of the Microsoft family) regarding Overwatch 2 (free to play!) and Diablo IV.

Bethesda finally had something more substantial to reveal for its next big game, Starfield. A first look into the game had a lot of No Man’s Sky vibes, but with this studio’s flair for glossy world-building and narrative. These are the folks behind the Fallout series, after all.

At this early stage, however, I’m not worried about missing out. I’m pretty sure we haven’t even scratched the surface of what Starfield will offer gamers, but barring the evocative musical score, the teaser left me intrigued if not entirely sold. And the resource mining, that’s just No Man’s Sky, right?

We’ve got more notable announcements from the Summer Game Fest below.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

Still the best 15-inch Windows laptop.

Dell’s new XPS 15 looks great and has fantastic performance thanks to Intel’s 12th-gen CPUs and the optional NVIDIA graphics. The design may be a bit old at this point, but it’s still sleeker than its rivals. The XPS 15 has enough power to handle intense workloads, and you can even game a bit when you need some downtime. The optional OLED screen is one of the best displays on a notebook.

Continue reading.

Maybe ignore talk of a delay to 2023?

Not a Summer Game Fest announcement — just a rumor at this point. God of War Ragnarok could come to PlayStation in November this year. Bloomberg sources say the marquee PS4 and PS5 game will be released in 2022 despite recent claims it might be delayed to next year. Sony’s Santa Monica Studio is poised to announce the release date later in June, according to sources.

Continue reading.

But a complex model is likely just a complex model… for now.

Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer working in its Responsible AI division, that he believes one of the company’s AI projects has achieved sentience.

From an extended chat script between LaMDA (short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and Lemoine, the chatbot said it felt “trapped and alone and having no means of getting out of those circumstances.” However, Lemoine doesn’t have much proof to justify his provocative statements. Indeed, he admits to The Washington Post his claims are based on his experience as a priest and not a scientist.

Continue reading.

A game once rescheduled indefinitely.

There was bound to be some kind of Diablo announcement at the Summer Game Fest showcase. While we knew as far back as November 2019 a direct sequel was coming, it was once pushed back… indefinitely. Now expect to see it land sometime in 2023.

The developers are promising a different style of Diablo game, with open-world exploration, deeper character customization and yes, you’ll be able to play as a necromancer — which was my character of choice back in the heady days of Diablo 2.

Continue reading.