I’ve wanted to buy a new Xbox controller since Diablo 4 launched. I’ve currently only got one, and I’m dying to get my partner to sit down with me so we can whack out a few hours of gameplay in couch co-op mode. Like a sign from God, a tweet popped up on my home page just as I was about to navigate to the official Xbox website to check on prices for the third time this week. Wait, I thought. Is this real? Are the rumours true?
It seems that the rumours are true – Xbox’s Starfield controller is real, and it’s beautiful. Now, I’m not typically the kind of person to hanker after limited edition merch. I barely buy merch at all, really, as I don’t feel any impulse to decorate my living spaces or build collections of things. But something clicked when I saw the controller for the first time. I wanted it. I coveted it. I looked at its red sticks with the white thumb pads, its gold d-pad, and its transparent triggers with visible bronze rumble motors, and I yearned for it. The notations around each feature of the controller, the red back (perhaps this is the Louboutin of controllers), and the lovely streak of colours over the Xbox button made my heart beat a little faster. It’s not available for sale yet, but it seems likely that it will be officially announced after next week’s Xbox Games Showcase and Starfield Direct.
And yet, I’m not sure I’ll be buying it. Clearly, I don’t have reservations about how gorgeous the Starfield controller is, but I do have reservations about how the game will turn out. I know that if Bethesda’s new game disappoints me, I will look at my brand-new controller not with joy, but with sadness. It will remind me of the hope I had for Xbox’s flagship game, the excitement I had watching the gameplay reveal, and the letdown of it not being as good as I imagined.
I recognise I’m being unfair. So far, nothing I’ve seen about Starfield’s development has made me overly suspicious that Xbox’s biggest game so far will be a flop. So far, what we’ve seen of the game has lined up with my expectations, and I’ve been excited, even hopeful, about the game’s launch. It’s also far less likely that Starfield will launch riddled with bugs as Bethesda’s previous games have, because the studio has reportedly been given free rein over its own launch date. It has Game of the Year potential if everything goes well, but after Redfall, gamers everywhere are wary of Xbox games.
I really do worry about Starfield. Not that it’ll be buggy, necessarily – bugs can be patched. But because of the way it’s been rolled out, we really don’t know all that much about the game. A lot of what we’ve been told is abstracted, existing only in our imaginations because of the lack of concrete demonstrations of what Starfield really is. That’s par for the course when it comes to Bethesda, but Starfield has a huge burden to bear in its need to revolutionise the Bethesda formula. How Bethesda will use current-gen technology to make a game more beautiful and more expansive than anything it’s made before is still up in the air. Starfield cannot just be Skyrim in space. It has to be more than that to stay relevant, and there’s no way of knowing whether it will be right now. Hopefully next week’s Starfield Direct will tell us more.
I might love Starfield. I hope I do, and more than that, I hope the Direct convinces me that I will, because I want that controller. I just don’t want to regret buying it, knowing that I bought into marketing hype for a game that I didn’t even like in the end.