Starfield takes cues from the best Star Wars games for ship combat

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Starfield's ship combat is taking heavy cues from some of the best Star Wars games ever made.

While you're behind the controls of your Starfield ship, you can take full control of how you manage your power systems, redirecting energy between various ship subsystems. Putting power into your engines will make you faster, or you can power up your grav drives to speed up the time until you can make a jump. Or you can put power into your weapons and shields with obvious effects.

This confirms what many fans suspected based on earlier preview footage, and puts Starfield's ship combat in line with the most beloved space combat sims out there - perhaps the most iconic of which are Star Wars games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter. In another cue from those games, a targeting reticule will show you how to lead your shots against moving enemies. You'll also be able to take down individual systems on enemy ships.

If you blow up an enemy, you can quickly loot it without leaving the cockpit, but if you disable the ship instead, you can dock and board it. Take out the enemy crew, and you can take control of the ship, adding it to your fleet. Between that and the Starfield ship customization systems, it seems we'll be able to build a massive, varied collection of ships.

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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.