The universe of Starfield is now in gamers’ hands, allowing everyone to view the massive improvements that Bethesda has made to its iconic RPG structure. Surprisingly, Bethesda Game Studios’ sci-fi adventure takes the best of all its prior games, including the controversial Fallout 76.
Starfield may suffer from poor Steam Deck performance and some minor audio issues, but for the most part the game has learned heaps from past Bethesda launches.
This includes the addition of a photo mode, first seen in Fallout 76. Starfield’s photo mode offers a tonne of options to let you snap memories and cool pics as you travel the cosmos on countless adventures. However, you can also use those photos for more than just an Xbox wallpaper.
Instead, photo mode pictures become your loading screens, something that was an amazing feature in Fallout 76. As you journey between planets, your digital scrapbook will fill up and give you a collection of cool loading screens to look at.
Of course, this does help if you’re good at taking photos with the game’s photo mode. After all, if you can only take absolutely atrocious-looking snaps, you’re going to have one ugly loading screen, but it’s still a fantastic feature and one of the truly great parts of Fallout 76.
In Fallout 76, the use of photo mode pictures in the game’s loading screen helped to sell the game’s themes of community immensely. As someone who played the game with their partner, the loading screens would constantly remind us of the journeys we had been on together, and that’s cute as hell.
Starfield is chock-full of small details across its 1000+ fully explorable planets. It may not have the sheer level of interactivity of Baldur’s Gate 3, but Bethesda’s attention to detail and impressive work around the game’s lore has proven thoroughly engaging.
Starfield is out right now for early access gamers on Xbox Series and PC. The game launches for everyone on September 6th.