Starfield New Gameplay Trailer & Deep Dive Videos

I posted here earlier this year about the first Starfield gameplay trailer from Elder Scrolls series and Fallout series creators Bethesda and now as their huge new space exploration game with over 1000 worlds nears release we’ve been given some much bigger gameplay trailers and big reveals to drool and obsess over!

As expected the gameplay trailer footage is very impressive and they’ve also done a big deep dive tour and presentation video showing even more gameplay footage. You can tell they’ve learned a lot of things to do and not to do from similar games like Star Citizen (who are still nowhere near release lol), No Mans Sky and Elite Dangerous over the last decade.

The space combat reminds me of Freelancer, while the solar system and orbital planet mineral scanning stuff totally reminds me of the good old Starflight series (which Tod Howard revealed was an influence in an interview), the character skills/perks/attributes of course have the usual Elder Scrolls and Fallout style systems, and there’s a truck load of Fallout 4 style weapon crafting and base building too. As usual there’s a pretty epic physical collectors edition with a custom NasaPunk Starfield xbox controller & headset, a storage case and wrist watch from your in-game spaceship, and that physical watch will naturally connect to the game too (similar to the real world PipBoy they did for Fallout 4). All very impressive! God knows when I’ll get to playing all this stuff though haha!

Starfield Gameplay Video

I’m a little late to the party on this one (what else is new lol) but being a big fan of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series and their Fallout series which I hope to do big website tributes to in the future (like I did with my Morrowind 5 year journey page) I’ve been eagerly watching all the hype around their next big game Starfield (nicknamed ‘Skyrim in space’), and very much enjoyed watching their big gameplay reveal video below recently.

Especially as the space travel and combat side of things actually feels very Freelancer like, and ironically even more so than the seemly never to be finished game Star Citizen, Chris Roberts’s spiritual sequel to his Freelancer & Wing Commander Privateer games. In fact they appear to be doing a lot of similar things to Star Citizen and will probably beat them to release! God knows when I’ll get to playing it lol but the Elder Scrolls & Freelancer fan in me is very much enjoying these videos!

UPDATE 19/06/2023: New gameplay videos posted HERE!

X4 Kingdom End Announced

YES!!!! They finally did it! Egosoft are creating another addon pack for their brilliant Freelancer like game X4 and this time they are bringing back the water based Borons! I’ve been asking for this for years and years! Every time people would say it’s impossible I’d pitch my ‘stations with separate water areas and Boron encounter suits for the normal dry areas’ idea and how it could work in the X4 engine. So to now see that Egosoft have actually done that and made it a reality makes me so happy, as this is pretty much what I pictured in my mind years ago. And I loved the extra touch of redoing the good old Kingdom End music in the trailer too. Well done Egosoft!

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1990040/X4_Kingdom_End/

X4 Cradle of Humanity

Attention X fans, Freelancer fans and space sim fans. The latest and greatest addon to X4 Foundations is here! Just like the brilliant X3 Terran Conflict addon did for X3 Reunion the new X4 Cradle of Humanity adds the mighty Terran empire into the game massively expanding the game sectors and adding so many cool new ships! As well as the usual fighter pilot stuff, commanding battleships, building a business empire of huge stations (that you can land inside and walk around), you can now terraform planets which is just mind boggling! X4 Cradle of Humanity is already now out on Steam and GoG so go check it out! Here’s some pics, trailers and music to drool over!

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1288460/X4_Cradle_of_Humanity/

X4 Foundations – Split Vendetta

If it wasn’t for Freelancer I would never have probably heard about the X series as being a little German studio they seem to go under the radar a bit. One of my mates who got me on to Freelancer in 2003 said “hey I found a game series just like it” and that was it, I was an addict lol. God knows how many hours I’ve put into the X series over the last 15 years.. and I’m still way behind in them due to my OCD urge to do and see everything haha! These days every man and his dog is making Freelancer like games but back in the 2000s and early 2010s there wasn’t that much out there so the X series (particularly X2 and X3) was my way of dealing with Freelancer withdrawal symptoms lol. Sure they didn’t have the great story and awesome planet landings Freelancer had but the ships and planets were gorgeous and the game universes huge. Being able to become a business mogul and build my own empire of stations and fleets of capital ships to whoops ass with was particularly fun and addictive for me. I’ve even been reading the X novels over the years to immerse myself in their universe further (although I’m gonna get stuck soon as they’re not all translated to English haha).

Well anyway those who are familiar with X games will also know that pretty much every game they release is practically a friggin disaster at launch lol with endless bugs and broken or missing features. Then rather amazingly unlike most studios they then spend years releasing patches and addons to the games until after around 2 or so years the game is friggin awesome lmao! Sure enough X4 has followed that path and they recently released the first addon for X4 Split Vandetta which appears to be quite an improvement over the messy vanilla release. No doubt they’ll be more coming too over the next few years. Presumably Egosoft must make their money back through addons as I don’t know how those guys survive the bad first releases and somehow keep going. I think the first X game came out in 1999 so its over 20 years now haha.

Has anywhere here played X4 yet? I don’t have it yet as I’ve been holding out of a physical collectors release (yeah I’m one of those old weirdos lol) which is probably not going to happen as they’ve said they can’t afford it these days sadly but nevertheless I’ve been drooling over their videos lately to build some anticipation for the inevitable digital only purchase lol. I like how you can walk around the bridge of your capital ships while station construction looks way more advanced than previous games with you putting together all the modules yourself into whatever custom setup you want. Then of course you can walk around them and hire staff and mercs etc.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/392160/X4_Foundations/

Trailer for the new Split addon looks cool…

And now they’re doing a 6 part video series talking about each aspect of the game.. my god does the latest version look more complicated than ever! There’s just SO MUCH you can do, customize and tinker with.

Trading

Starpoint Gemini 3 (Freelancer Like Game)

Wow! Been given a great tip off from a member of the Freelancer Facebook group. If the recent release of Rebel Galaxy Outlaw wasn’t cool enough it now looks like we’ve got another game very similar to the mighty classic Freelancer. The previous Starpoint Gemini games were sort of Freelancer like but involved capital ship combat whereas this new Starpoint Gemini 3 game is very Freelancer like with Fighter based play and landing on planets and space stations with seedy space bars! It also has an interesting side game where you take control of a small probe infiltrating derelicts and space stations avoiding security systems that sort of reminds me of some of X2 – The Threat’s side missions. The game is still in early access on steam so naturally it lacks polish but is already looking absolutely gorgeous!! The only fault I have with its otherwise stunning graphics are the very plastic mannequin like people but apparently the devs have said they’ll be fixing that.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/977720/Starpoint_Gemini_3/

This guy has a done a nice gameplay vid of the early access beta:

Here’s some screenshots:

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (Freelancer Like Game)

Wow! Rebel Galaxy Outlaw looks like one of the closest Freelancer spiritual sequel games I’ve EVER seen!

I’d already covered the excellent previous Rebel Galaxy game on my Freelancer Legacy Games Website but they have taken things to a whole new level with their new game. You can tell the devs are Freelancer fans as the main character is called Juno and it’s got beautiful planetary landings! The graphics in space are stunning and the cockpits look pretty cool too. Looks like you can land at bases and worlds and visit dealers and bars (even play pool lol). Sadly it’s an Epic store exclusive but that’s okay, I’m in no hurry as my gaming to do list is endless lol.

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/rebel-galaxy-outlaw/home

(you can briefly see a planet landing in this video review at the 1:30 mark)

Here’s some screenshots:

New Star Citizen Squadron 42 Trailer

Omg.. mind blown! There’s quite a difference in quality between this new Squadron 42 trailer and the previous ones. Also more celebrities! Considering I’m more of a single player than a multiplayer, Squadron 42 is the game I’m really looking forward to playing! I’ll probably only end up watching other people play the big multiplayer Star Citizen game when it comes out, but you never know haha. Either way this looks amazing! Takes me back to the good old Wing Commander and Freelancer days!

X4 Foundations Coming Soon!

Another game I’m super excited about is the up and coming sequel to the awesome X Series of space adventure and trading games. X4 Foundations looks like it will play similar to great classics like Freelancer with lots of space combat, trading and walking around space bars conducting ‘business’. After fans complained about the previous game X-Rebirth not allowing you to fly any ship (which you could do in previous games) they have brought it back in X4 but have still kept the awesome walking around your ship and space stations stuff of X-Rebirth (the Freelancer fan in me is very excited about that bit!). They’ve vastly improved station building too which means players will be able to craft huge empires of modular stations protected by fleets of ships including giant battleships where you can stand on the bridge surrounded by your crew! Egosoft has been releasing alpha footage over the last year but now they have announced a proper November 30th release date and have just put out official trailer and gameplay footage videos which I’ll post below!

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/392160/X4_Foundations/

MASSIVE Site Update

Wow.. over 18,000 visitors to Blake’s Sanctum now! And quite a bit of increased traffic to this blog as well! 🙂

I looked at a screenshot of the website that I took at the end of 2014 and saw that there had been around 14,000 visitors over the history of the site at the meaning 4,000 people had visited this site over the last 2 years which was an amazing increase, but then I found another screenshot I took towards the end of 2015 showing the counter at around 15,000 which means that 2015 was just another year for the site and it was in fact this year that things exploded with 3,000 visitors. I have no idea why considering I hadn’t worked on the site since 2014! It hasn’t been a great 2 years in real life, health troubles, a long term relationship breakdown and a few other dramas certainly slowed me down a lot. But I’m back now and have been very busy over the last 3 months working on the site again.

As posted previously I’ve recently released a brand new Star Trek Gaming page which is probably now the largest section on my site with a huge tribute list of fan projects. I then went and updated every other gaming section on the site with new game tributes, better existing game tributes, more screens, more videos, more long lost demos, and navigation upgrades. If you visit your favourite section of the site, odds are you’ll find some new stuff there! 🙂

Thank you everyone for your support, I’m now going to upgrade my youtube channel and then finally release my 2 big mod projects to the world!

Here’s my complete list of changes:

Games Section
Changes made to existing content:
General – Contents menu added.
General – All back buttons changed to utilise HTML bookmarks. Now users don’t have to re-scroll down the entire page constantly! 🙂
General – Fixed some missing slashes in code.

Age of Wonders Series
New AoW related projects found:
Last Days of Old Earth – New game similar to AoW & MoM
Thea: The Awakening – New game similar to AoW & MoM without tactical combat
Dominions Series – Great retro looking series similar to AoW & MoM
Conquest of Elysium Series – Retro looking series (created by Dominions team) similar to AoW & MoM
Armello – New game similar to AoW & MoM without tactical combat
Chaos Reborn – Game similar to AoW, HoMM & King’s Bounty

Changes made to existing AoW content:
General – Contents menu added.
General – All back buttons changed to utilise HTML bookmarks. Now users don’t have to re-scroll down the entire page constantly! 🙂
General – Fixed some missing slashes in code.
General – Added Good Old Games buy links to all games.
AoW1 – Added download link to Community Content pack (heaps of maps & campaigns).

Babylon 5 Games
New B5 related projects added:
Babylon 5 Into The Fire – Someone leaked to the public the original unfinished Sierra game!
Babylon 5 Stardrive – Total Conversion mod for Stardrive. Thankyou to Anibal for the tip!
Babylon 5 Civilization 4 Final Frontier mod – TC mod for Civilization IV Beyond The Sword Final Frontier. THIS is the Babylon 5 galaxy conquering strategy game fans have always wanted!

Changes made to existing B5 content:
General – Contents menu added.
General – All back buttons changed to utilise HTML bookmarks. Now users don’t have to re-scroll down the entire page constantly! 🙂
General – Fixed some missing slashes in code.
General – Added Good Old Games & Steam buy links to mods requiring a base game.

Command & Conquer Series
New C&C related projects added:
C&C All Stars – Cool Tiberium & Red Alert Crossover Total Conversion Mod for C&C Generals.

Changes made to existing C&C content:
General – Contents menu added.
General – All back buttons changed to utilise HTML bookmarks. Now users don’t have to re-scroll down the entire page constantly! 🙂
General – Fixed some missing slashes in code.
RA2 – Added Good Old Games vote links.