Everything we spotted in the Starfield launch date announcement

eurogamer.net:

Yesterday was a bit of a rollercoaster for those of us looking forward to Starfield, wasn't it?

Finally, a release date! But later in the year than we'd hoped for!

Whilst Starfield director Todd Howard talked in front of the camera for the announcement video, what we all really wanted a peek at was the screen lead producer Tim Lamb was using to play the game in the background. Throughout the video, we got brief glimpses at other developers playing and testing Starfield, so you can bet we got our magnifying glasses out to see what details we could spot.

First off, in the bottom left of the screen we can see the compass. It's impossible to make out any of the text when Lamb is playing, but in closer shots we can see Nesoi, Cassiopeia I, Tau Ceti VIII-B, and Charybdis III. Cassiopeia and Tau Ceti are real systems out there in space, while the others could either be completely made up or based on real systems too but given different names. As for the area Tim Lamb was exploring, the name of the area has to be short, and the ground looks quite red… Lamb later enters an area called Mars Mech Factory, so I think I'm safe to assume we can visit our little neighbour Mars.

At one point, Lamb turns around in-game and we can see a person running up to his character, which is presumably a companion NPC. The companion's shadow is visible when Lamb stops to loot some containers. Lamb also sneakily changes from first to third person so we can see how that looks. Again, it's difficult to tell as we can't make out much from the screen, but it looks like you might have no model or shadow in first person, a minor point which some fans have expressed disappointment about. Container looting seems to work in the same way it did in Fallout 4,