Of course Starfield has a lockpicking minigame

Starfield made its big gameplay debut at the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase today, and you shouldn't lose sight the most important between between the massive universe to explore and ship creation systems: there is a lockpicking minigame.

Yes, Bethesda made sure to show off that lockpicking minigame in the very first gameplay footage for Starfield. We see the player character attempt to open a locked weapon case, which requires the use of "digipicks" to open.

You rotate a set of those digipicks around a circle with pieces missing. Fill in those pieces with the appropriate picks until you've completed the circle, and you get access to the chest.

It looks a lot faster than the old Skyrim and Fallout lockpicking games, at least, though there is a familiar difficulty ranking for these locks - the one we see in the footage is rated as "novice."

You can see the lockpicking at the 5:03 mark in the video above.

Of course, the 15 minutes of footage showed far more than lockpicking minigames. We saw space pirates and a No Man's Sky-style scanner, we saw a broad overview of the game's robust character creator, and we heard the promise of 1,000 planets to explore, too.

Starfield still does not have an official release date beyond 2023, but we've recently seen hints that it will at least be early in the year.

Even without a real E3 2022, the E3 2022 schedule is still packed, so you can follow those links to stay current on everything that's happening throughout the weekend. Check out our Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase live coverage for all of today's big announcements, too.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.