Starfield Early Access: How it works and when you can play
With 1000 planets to explore, it can't hurt to get a head start.
Starfield officially launches on September 6, but if every day without Bethesda's latest ambitious adventure feels like an eternity, you can play it up to five eternities sooner with Early Access. Joining an increasing number of big game releases in recent times (like Diablo 4), Bethesda has opted to let you jump the starting laser pistol if you pre-order one of the more expensive available editions. Here's everything you need to know about Starfield Early Access and when you can play.
How "Early" is Starfield Early Access?
The specific wording Bethesda uses is "up to five days," with a note that "actual play time depends on purchase date and will be subject to possible outages and applicable time zone differences." The simpler version is that, barring any unforeseen technical issues, you should be able to cruise the spaceways sometime on September 1 in most parts of the world. Starfield doesn't require a constant internet connection to play, so the bit about outages is probably just referring to issues Steam or the Xbox desktop app may run into installing and validating your copy.
How do you get Starfield Early Access?
To get Early Access to Starfield, you'll need to purchase the Premium Edition (physical or digital) or the Constellation edition (a physical-only collectors box). The former is $100 and comes with one story expansion, a skin pack, and digital copies of the artbook and soundtrack. The latter will run you $300 and comes with all of that plus a bunch of physical goodies. The $70 Standard Edition does not come with Early Access, nor does the version you can play for no additional charge with your Game Pass subscription.
Xbox does offer the Premium Edition content to buy separately as an add-on, but currently displays "Purchase Options Not Available" if you haven't bought a full price retail copy of Starfield on the Xbox app, so we can't say for sure if it will be possible to buy only the upgrade and get early access. It seems unlikely.
Will people think I'm cool or something if I get Starfield Early Access?
I can't speak for everyone, but I think you're pretty cool just for making it to the end of this article. Personally, I think I'll give Bethesda the extra five days to squash any major bugs that the first wave of players run into. But you do you.