Starfield player stumbles upon wild NPC fight club

Jake Nichols
Starfield combat gameplay

One Starfield player stumbled upon an unexpected fight club in which human NPCs were battling in a chaotic brawl.

Since Starfield’s release, players have been encountering all kinds of quirks in the game. While many of these “features” are intentional, there are many that remain up for debate.

From being launched into space with just the cockpit of their ship to having asteroids as companions, Bethesda’s classic janky gameplay has featured heavily in Starfield already.

One recent discovery can now be added to the list of possible bugs that would be a welcome feature, as a player walked in on a group of human NPCs brawling inside a spaceship, leading many to believe it was some kind of fight club.

The player shared the experience on Reddit in a post titled, “Can anybody explain what’s going on here?” In the clip, a hostile ship can be seen landing closeby to the player. The curious player approaches the ship and, upon getting close enough, witnesses the back door of the ship open up to reveal a group of NPCs fighting each other.

The player maintains a safe distance, zooming in with their scope to get a better view of the action-packed NPC brawl. Three NPCs tagged as “Human” are battling it out with a “Spacer Beast” in a chaotic fight that has left the community utterly confused and intrigued.

“They clearly had a fight on who was gonna fight you,” one user commented. “I don’t care if that is a bug, these moments make me love the game,” another said.

It’s clear that the Starfield community has embraced these unexpected moments, as another player joked about the ambiguity between a bug and a feature in Bethesda games. “The most important thing here is that you can’t even tell if it was a bug, or a feature. With Bethesda, you never know,” they wrote.

While this fight club may not be an intentional inclusion, it’s at least deliberate in the sense of how Bethesda embraces the chaos that unfolds in their games.

Bethesda’s head of publishing, Pete Hines, recently defended the company’s reputation for making “janky” games, stating, “There is some amount of that which is intentional, meaning we embrace chaos. We could make a safer, less buggy, less risky game if we wanted to. But what we try to lean into is player freedom.”

While bugs are inevitable in such a large-scale game like Starfield, they don’t necessarily detract from the overall player experience. Whether it’s players being launched into space without their ships or unexpected NPC fight clubs, Starfield players can look forward to all kinds of entertaining in-game experiences.

About The Author

Jake Nichols was formerly a Senior Writer on the Australian Dexerto team. A "washed-up" competitive gamer with an economics degree, he has a unique angle on industry trends. When not writing, he's snapping away in Marvel Snap and hunting purple sector times in sim racing games. You can contact Jake at jake.nichols@dexerto.com