Whoops! Bethesda boss' T-shirt seems to validate leaked Starfield screenshots from earlier in the year
Merch amusement.
Here's the dilemma: your boss is getting a kind of lifetime achievement award and you've been asked to contribute to a video montage bigging them up. Shouldn't be hard. But what do you wear? That's the issue.
Go smart? No, too formal, these are video games we're talking about. But you want to keep some kind of professionalism about you. You are the managing director of Bethesda Game Studios after all.
Got it! You'll go on-brand. You've got that T-shirt, remember? New owner Microsoft will love it - that Phil Spencer, he's all about a well-placed tee. It's a win-win. You can look professional while promoting your new game Starfield at the same time. Bin-go. What could possibly go wrong?
Whoops! Shouldn't have jinxed it. Forgot to think about the logo on the sleeve, didn't you? People haven't seen that before, that space agency kind of logo with the stars and what is probably a planet underneath. Oh no, wait, they have! Only, when they saw it, it was on the arm of a character in an unverified Starfield screenshot earlier this year.
You didn't just validate it, did you?
Note: Bethesda hasn't confirmed any of this. No-one has confirmed the logo on Ashley Cheng's arm, in the Todd Howard Develop Star Award video (sleuthed by Reddit user Rynderend), is the same logo on the arm on the character in the leaked screenshot. Hell of a coincidence, though, isn't it?
And if we were to take this coincidence as validation, we should probably consider the other images leaked by the same source as could-be-real-actually, too. Maybe even the 2021 release date the leaker spouted is real too, though 2021 seems awfully close now I think about it.
Todd Howard was awarded his Develop Star Award this week, coinciding with a videoed Q&A with GamesIndustry.biz for the show (he had to do some work after all). In that interview, he talked about how Bethesda's faithful Creation Engine had undergone "probably the largest" overhaul ever for Starfield - "maybe even larger than Morrowind to Oblivion", whatever that means. But then he does always tend to say that about new Bethesda Game Studios games.
Sadly, we don't actually know much more about Starfield beyond these scraps. It was years ago now I spoke to Howard after Starfield was announced.
We know it's Bethesda Game Studios' next game, it's next big single-player game - ie. the one that will come out before The Elder Scrolls 6 - and we know it's sci-fi, so we'll be up in space, floating around, probably flying around. But beyond that: nadda. So, I suppose, what do you want it to be? And don't say Star Citizen.
