The community is buzzing about Starfield, a game that is undoubtedly going to be one of 2023’s highest-selling and most anticipated games, but the information coming out of Bethesda, save for their blowout at the Xbox & Bethesda June Showcase, has been fairly sparse – now industry legend, Todd Howard, is looking to course correct things a bit with a new video being released that answers some of the communities biggest questions about the upcoming open-world RPG.
In the nearly five-minute long video, Howard discusses a number of elements, including the hard science fiction setting, which while grounded in scientific fact, also takes some liberties in then creating the fictional world atop that foundation. One of the liberties Howard discusses is around how the studio handles gravity,
We were really into fuel and how the gravity drive works. And I’m reading papers on quantum physics and bending space in front of you. You don’t actually warp, you bend the space toward – you bring the space toward you. And so we were playing that and it became very punitive to the player. Your ship would run out of fuel and the game would just stop.
You just want to get back to what you were doing, so we’ve recently changed it where the fuel in your ship and the grav drive limits how far you could go at once, but it doesn’t run out of fuel. Maybe there’ll be an update or a mod that allows that, but that’s what we’re doing now.
Character creation has long been an important aspect of Fallout, and Elder Scrolls games developed by Bethesda Game Studios, but we’ve always had to live with some negative character traits. Well, in an exciting twist, Howard has confirmed that we may be able to undo those negative aspects of the characters we create, saying,
We have a way in the game, kind of an activity or quest you can do to remove that trait, as opposed to, ‘I don’t like my character, I want to start over’. Each of them are something that you can solve that removes the entire trait for the rest of your playthrough.
Howard also highlights how the team has reverted back to “a classic Bethesda style” dialogue system, empowering players to choose the lines of dialogue they pursue, based upon the facial cues of those they’re speaking to, something that will inevitably add to the immersion due a segment of the gameplay that Bethesda Game Studios games have often been criticised for in recent years with characters often having quite wooden, unemotive expressions.
Starfield is currently tracking towards a first-half of 2023 release after the game was delayed at mid-year from its planned Holiday 2022 release window. The game is slated to launch on Xbox Series X|S and PC.
