In a recent Q&A series, Bethesda talks about the direction of Starfield, described as a “hard sci-fi” game.

Starfield’s “Hard Sci-fi” Direction Includes the Dangers of Space

The Q&A video series focusing on the upcoming RPG Starfield has been divulging details about the game. In the most recent, Todd Howard talked about inspiration, traits, dialogue and described the title as a “hard sci-fi” game.

The Dark Side of Space

Starfield has a few inspirations, being the 1984 space sim SunDog: Frozen Legacy as well as the pen-and-paper RPG Traveller. Most interesting Howard has defined the game as “hard sci-fi”. But what exactly is hard sci-fi? He shared that it’s about “how man explored space” and because there are dangers of space such as meeting your demise to “space cold”.

Having a completely realistic space-influenced game however, proves to hinder the experience for the player which they’ve taken into consideration:

Your ship would run out of fuel and the game would just stop, you just want 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 can go at once. But it doesn’t run out oof fuel.

Traits Aren’t Permanent

As for traits, Howard expressed there will be “super fun”. While some will have “some sort of negative” effect, they can be countered by doing a certain activity or quest in-game to get rid of it.

Be prepared to experience a lengthy narrative as Bethesda has teased that there are 250,000 lines of dialogue so far if you compare that to previous games such as Fallout 4 having about half that with 111,000 lines and Skyrim with only 60,000. Howard rightfully says “That’s a lot of dialogue” and it will include a speech persuasion system. The system will feel natural to the speech and options available.

Starfield fans can expect more Constellation Questions instalments as we get closer to the release of the game on Xbox and PC in 2023. In case you missed the previous info reveals such as Character Creation Philosophy and that the game will have 1000 Planets.

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