Given the many planets in Starfield, Bethesda’s upcoming space simulation game, there’s a lot of room for speculation ahead of its release for Xbox and PC next year. But this time of speculation is slowly coming to an end! Inspired by fictional themes and an atmosphere that goes beyond hardcore realism, director and executive producer Todd Howard recently stated that the game aims to maintain gameplay fun while providing a compelling simulation of space exploration.
Starfield, Bethesda’s next big open-world game, is slated for 2023. Although we know that the game will be consistent with the studio’s previous works, with “classic Bethesda-style dialogues” offering many different possibilities, and a large and ambitious open world where space travel is dangerous lies much is still unclear. Director and Executive Producer Todd Howard recently gave an interview to Youtuber Lex Fridman in which he discussed his career and a variety of mechanics, concepts and insights into the Starfield development process. You can watch the entire, almost three-hour interview here:
According to Howard, no one should expect Starfield to be a robust space sim that requires the player to track down a whole host of resources or risk being stranded in space. “It takes some effort,” Howard said, addressing the challenge of managing your resources and exposing yourself to environmental hazards, but it’s not a hardcore game. The level of survival and challenge was tweaked and “scaled back” during development that began right after Fallout 4’s release – a development process that Howard says was more driven by console exclusivity on Xbox.
We noticed that [wenn einem Raumschiff der Treibstoff ausgeht] the game just stops. You play the game and you’re like, ‘I’m out of fuel, okay, I guess I’m going to wander around this planet and try to get fuel so I can go back to what I was doing before. It’s just a fun killer”
Todd Howard speculates that there might be a hardcore mode for the game in the future, but for now expect pretty standard challenges like: B. monitoring the spacesuit for environmental hazards in space or on planets, but not to the level of No Man’s Sky where you have to make sure that all of the ship’s systems are perfectly fueled and operational.
Starfield’s planets and star systems, which Howard describes as a balance of “handcrafted content [und] “Open Procedural Planetary Experience” described were built with “realistic looking” tiles, which are then edited to wrap around an entire planet – a development practice not too uncommon for Bethesda games. The planets and the systems themselves, Howard continues, are also given a number that indicates the level of difficulty one can expect in a particular region of space.
