Bethesda Game Studios has its work cut out for it with multiple its projects, as Bethesda Game Studios Director Todd Howard made even more clear in a recent interview with IGN. Howard not only spilled a few more details about Starfield, but he also spoke to the studio’s plans for the future, even name-dropping Fallout 5.
Bethesda’s spacefaring adventure showed off its first gameplay during this week’s Xbox and Bethesda showcase, and players drew many comparisons with No Man’s Sky. One notable feature of that game was the ability to fly ships directly from space onto a planet without any loads, an impressive feat considering the massive scale of the game’s universe.
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Howard recalled that developers did test out a similar feature for Starfield, but it ended up on the cutting room floor due to the element being “not that important to the player” when compared to the time it would take to develop it. “We decided early in the project that the on-surface is one reality, and then when you’re in space, it’s another reality.”
Compared to No Man’s Sky, Starfield layers on the traditional worlds and storytelling of a Bethesda role-playing game onto the vast space exploration, so Howard’s argument about complexity likely holds water. So even though the Xbox Series X|S has a blazing fast solid-state drive inside of it, the game’s size means that the team would rather focus its efforts on the game’s many other pieces. And further speaking to its scale, Howard also shared that Starfield would be the biggest of Bethesda’s games to date. “It has more quests, so it might be 20% more than our previous ones.”
Many of these quests will probably take place in or around New Atlantis, the biggest city Bethesda has ever crafted and one of four major cities that players will explore throughout the story. While players will have plenty to do on the game’s 1,000 planets, Starfield won’t lack handcrafted content, and Howard made it clear that players can bypass the procedurally generated spaceflights and get straight to the good stuff.
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Fans of Bethesda’s other properties may be wondering about the development progress for The Elder Scrolls VI, which was announced years ago alongside Starfield. Howard said that the game is still in preproduction and even threw in that Fallout 5 would be next on the docket after another trip to Tamriel. With those two games in the works, the main RPG team at Bethesda will be hard at work for decades to come.