StarfieldWiki:News/Todd Howard IGN Interview

Todd Howard Discusses Starfield in IGN Interview — June 14, 2022

Following off on the heels of the Official Gameplay Reveal, Todd Howard held an interview with IGN to discuss some of the burning questions the demonstration generated. This fifteen minute interview used its time well, and covered a lot of ground in that time. Here is a quick summary of some of the major answers:

• They expected people to be surprised by the comment about how many planets are present and explorable. Todd Howard said they might do a deep dive to explain it more.
• Todd Howard went over Bethesda's history with procedural generation and discussed how it is used to help create their worlds, using Skyrim's quests and landscape as an example. He also compared choosing to explore the procedural-generated portions of planets to Daggerfall's gameplay.
• The technical difference between having a single explorable planet and a thousand is minuscule once the systems for the first one are created.
• There is more handcrafted content in this game than any previous Bethesda game. For example, there is over 200,000 recorded voice lines.
• Ship combat will be more slow paced, and draws inspiration from Mech Warrior and FTL for their power management gameplay.
• You can act as a smuggler.
• You can visit star stations.
• You can disable, board, and steal enemy ships.
• Backgrounds are reminiscent to classes from previous games, and there are around twenty in total. As was demonstrated before, your background will have some unique dialogue related to it.
• Players will have a set starting point for all players, with a "step out" moment like previous games.
• New Atlantis is the biggest city in Starfield, as well as the largest Bethesda has ever built. Constellation also keeps their headquarters there.
• Besides exploration and answer the mysteries of the universe, Constellation also deals with recovering "Old Earth artifacts".
• Todd described the main story being about 20% than previous games, although said it was still not fully set in stone. To explain further, he said that if the normal length of time for completing the main quest in their previous games was 25 hours, Starfield would be about 30 hours or possibly 40 hours. This did not include faction and side quest lines.
• He expects modders will be very pleased with the possibilities of the game.
• You cannot fly directly to the surface to a planet's surface. Gameplay is divided between ground and space segments, as the amount of work needed to do a seamless transition between the two was seen as a waste of available resources.
• As expected, Fallout 5 will be the game they work on after The Elder Scrolls VI.

You can see IGN's video here, and you can see their own summary of major points here.