GamingStarfield’s multiple ideas of time have fans asking about black holes

I've been bolting together some ideas for a longer Starfield feature and while plying the sliplanes of Reddit, stumbled on this conversation about the game's handling of time. As many of you will know/be very weary of hearing, Starfield features hundreds of planets, together with moons and space stations, scattered around the galaxy in different solar systems. Real-life planets, of course, aren't fixed points: they rotate and orbit their stars at the different speeds, depending on their mass and distance, which means that days, nights and seasons have different durations.

Starfield appears to model this to some degree. Bethesda's Starfield Direct from June makes a fleeting distinction (thanks, JuiceHead33) between "local time", corresponding to where you land on a planet's surface, and "UT", which sounds like an abbreviation of "universal time", and presumably describes the passage of time throughout the wider galaxy. Both are displayed in 24 hour format. You can explore planet locations at different local times, as indicated by your fancy neo-Casio watch, with shifting lighting conditions that seem to correspond to the spinning of the planet around its sun. There's footage showing one particular area, The Hitching Post in Akila City, by day and night. The game also seems to model planetary alignments - there's the beginnings of a solar eclipse visible during one segment of the video.

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