Yesterday, we got to see a 15-minute gameplay reveal of Starfield as part of the Xbox & Bethesda Summer Game Fest showcase. The demo has players calling Starfield "No Man’s Skyrim" as the player is able to scan objects, mine for materials, fly to various planets, and shoot aliens with blasters. However, unlike No Man’s Sky, players can customize their spaceships rather than being forced to wait on RNG to provide them with their perfect ride.
Also unlike No Man’s Sky, Starfield will provide players with starting traits as part of character creation. The character creator revealed players will start Starfield by first creating their avatar and then picking several background traits. One of those background traits was called "Starter Home," which provides the player with a 50,000 credit mortgage for "a small house on a peaceful little moon." As noted by PCGamesN, this brings back an RPG mechanic from The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall where players had to take out massive loans in order to afford a home.
Mortgages might provide you with a home, but you’ll also be indebted to a bank. In the case of Starfield that would be "GalBank," which is presumably a shortening of Galactic Bank. What happens if you can’t make payments wasn't immediately clear.
It’s also not immediately clear what benefit a small house on a moon will provide the player. You can already captain a spaceship which seems to be fully customizable and outfitted with everything the player could need. Having a mortgage might just be a drain on credits when you’d rather be pouring resources into improving your ability to explore.
And there’s a lot to explore in Starfield. According to last night’s presentation, there’s 1,000 planets for players to land, run around, loot resources, and kill aliens on. Sure, most of those are going to be procedurally generated, which might make a few of them feel barren and empty, but you can’t expect a developer to hand-craft 1,000 planets, right?