Can we lead small fleet of our ships in game?

[Jack Greedy]

I wonder if we can own more than one ship and if we will be able to crew them and make them follow us to support in fights or enlarge our capacity.
Just like in Sid Meier's Pirates, it would be cool addon.
Anyone knows something?

[Thorley23]

Originally posted by Jack Greedy:

I wonder if we can own more than one ship and if we will be able to crew them and make them follow us to support in fights or enlarge our capacity.
Just like in Sid Meier's Pirates, it would be cool addon.
Anyone knows something?

When asked, the people I know who claim to be beta testers with access to the same version reviewers and such have been using have said that this is not possible.

You can have multiple ships, and can capture them and such, but can only fly one ship at a time personally and only do missions in that one ship. This is because the game is very mission and crew centric and your assorted NPC companions and such will be on your ship and giving mission and plot-centric dialogue and such. Not to mention conceptually a lot of things you'll do in space are supposed to be based on a feeling of isolation or some kind of desperate mission and as a result showing up with a fleet in tow wouldn't work.

As it was explained to me this is NOT a space sim, the ship is mostly a travel device to get from planet to planet, and you will not be manually flying from system to system in some kind of "open world in space" experience. Typically when your in control of your ship there is some kind of plot-centric reason or encounter happening, typically involving combat.

The way it sounds is a lot like say early "Fallout" or the "Wasteland" games where you say select a space destination on the map, if an encounter happens then it opens a combat map and you'll be commanding your ship and dealing with whatever that happens to be, then you leave, and continue accross the map. It was described as overall being similar to "Star Trek Online" but not exactly.

They did say that in some missions you will have NPC ships with you, but not typically people flying your captured ships. Rather you mostly switch your ships at an area called a star port on various planets.

They also said that as cool as capturing ships is, it's overall kind of "meh". One thing you have to understand about this game is that your not just some space freebooter. Your part of a sort of primitive star fleet like military-exploration organization called "Constellation" and your not exactly in charge of it. While your given increasing ability to faff about and eventually your orders are sort of broad enough and you have access enough to consider it "open world" for quite a while you are sort of limited by the scope of your orders.

While they claim to be unsure how much of this will be in the final game (they are assuming this is close to the final version though) they are largely saying that ships are one of the ways content is "gated" so to speak to keep the plot unfolding the right way while still seeming open. As you play and do missions, more options open up, and Contellation authorizes you to use more impressive ships. For the most part in their play the ship they assign you is typically far better than anything you can capture or buy elsewhere (which makes sense as it's from the highest tier military type organization). For the most part the only reason to ever use any other ship besides the one your assigned is for something very specialized, as say a cargo freighter or something might let you haul more stuff if you have a need to, but for a moderate advantage in that area it's likely to be crap tier in everything else.

That said there are apparently missions to capture ships for different factions, which is primarily why this is a thing, just as there are bits where Contellation apparently tells you stuff like "go establish so many outposts in this area" and you can't proceed until you've done that, symbolizing you've explored and made a foothold in that area.

Those expecting a typical Bethesda experience where you say escape from being a prisoner, or step out of a vault, and can then technically go hog wild with increasing options based on knowledge from other times they played are ALLEGEDLY probably going to be really disappointed with this one. In this one your not just some guy caught up in events who gets to run around becoming more powerful and has the leisure of treating the major plot of the game as a mild suggestion. Your part of a military organization, have bosses, and your ship, authority, and ability to be anything really is sort of dependent on them and their good will, so by this premise your a lot more limited. I mean obviously it wouldn't make sense for a top tier organization to just give some newbie who learned three random skills in their command program a ship and the basic instructions "here are some weapons, have fun doing whatever the hell you want". You have to approach this one with the right mindset, and perhaps maybe Starfield 2 will replace Constellation with an anarcho-terrorist front that will operate much like what some people are probably thinking this is going to be like.


We'll see if my information is right or wrong in the long term, even I'm not pretending it's entirely reliable. But I'd brace yourself for what I'm saying as the people I'm listening to seem to be pretty consistent and don't seem to be coordinating.