Bethesda Game Studios game director Todd Howard appeared in a five-minute video to answer a few of the community’s burning Starfield questions, covering everything from how in-game dialogue works to the kinds of classic RPGs that have been influencing the team during development (like SunDog and Traveller). One important question Todd Howard addressed was whether or not Bethesda considers Starfield to be “hard sci-fi.” Howard does lean toward its being hard sci-fi but feels that the answer isn’t so simple. He explained that, because Starfield is a video game, some features, such as limited spaceship fuel, needed to be tweaked in order to ensure players weren’t left to freeze in the cold emptiness of space.
Howard also touched on how traits work and the Starfield dialogue system. Regarding the latter, he said that the team went back to a “classic Bethesda-style dialogue,” where players need to pay attention to NPC emotions and make choices based on those interactions. There are currently more than 250,000 lines of dialogue in Starfield, which comes out to around 140,000 more than what was present in Fallout 4 and 190,000 more than what was in Skyrim. Starfield also packs in an updated persuasion system, which you can catch a glimpse of above or below.
As for the projects that inspired Bethesda, Howard said games like SunDog, Traveller, and other old-school RPGs that the team grew up with helped influence Starfield’s direction. See all the questions Todd Howard answered about Starfield in the video below.
It’s always nice to learn more about Bethesda’s next epic RPG adventure, but we’re actually still waiting for a final Starfield release date since it saw a delay earlier this year. You can expect it to come to PC and Xbox Series X | S sometime in the first half of 2023.
