Starfield's design director has said Bethesda regained the trust of players after fixing Fallout 76 following its rough launch.
16.08.2023 - 19:29 / rockpapershotgun.com / Emil Pagliarulo / Will Shen
Hold onto your warp nacelles and hyperdrives, Starfield aficionados. The game's lead designer Emil Pagliarulo and lead quest designer Will Shen have hosted a Discord Q&A about Bethesda's forthcoming space colossus. Self-despising fool that I am, I sat up late at the office taking notes throughout - please accept a modest avalanche of new details.
First off, a note on the subject of Starfield and housing. You can own property in "all the major cities in the game", according to Pagliarulo, with some dwellings being purchaseable and others, quest rewards.
Much like Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, the game features a Kids Stuff trait that generates parents based on your choice of custom character, allowing you to inflict your terrible physiognomical experiments on at least two other in-game entities. "No spoilers, but I think fans will really appreciate the actors we got to play those roles," Pagliarulo added.
And now, a few words on the subject of contraband items. You can apparently buy ship modules that allow you to smuggle illegal items past the security ships orbiting major settled planets, much like the false partitions aboard the Millennium Falcon. (Pagliarulo mentions organ trading, but I'm fairly sure he's jesting.) Get caught, and as in other Bethesda games, you can go to jail, pay a fine or blow seventeen shades of starlight out of the arresting officer/patrol craft. "The Settled Systems is more like Skyrim than Fallout 4's Commonwealth in that regard," Pagliarulo commented.
There are a few quests that are specifically about crime and punishment, actually, and if you're really into underhand antics, you can play a double-agent - infiltrating the gorgeous pirates of the Crimson Fleet on behalf of the horrible G-men of the United Colonies, with the option of betraying either in the end. This particular quest takes inspiration from the movie Donnie Brasco.
If all this strikes you as perfectly barbaric, you might be displeased to know that there's no way of completing Starfield without killing anybody. "We talked about this very early on during pre-production, whether or not we would fully support a "non-lethal" playthrough," Pagliarulo wrote. "We realized that, for various reasons, that wasn't totally feasible." There are, however, non-lethal weapons plus a Speech Challenge mechanic which kicks in at scripted intervals, giving you the chance to talk your way out of situations, and especially those featuring important characters you might be particularly keen not to murder.
Pagliarulo and Shen had a few things to say on the subject of religion. Starfield features real-life faiths, would you believe, which makes sense given that it occurs a hundred or so years from our present-day. "Existing,
Starfield's design director has said Bethesda regained the trust of players after fixing Fallout 76 following its rough launch.
Starfield's design director says that player trust accrued over the rebuilding of Fallout 76 carried over to the new game.
Emil Pagliarulo, the lead designer of Bethesda’s upcoming mega-RPG Starfield, recently revealed that the developers had a Jesuit priest-in-training advise them when creating the game’s religions. Shane Liesegang, the up-and-coming priest in question, actually served as a former writer for Bethesda who specifically worked on both Skyrim and Fallout 4. That former connection combined with Liesegang’s studies helped the team at Bethesda make one of Starfield’s original religions as authentic and believable as possible.
Bethesda consulted a former Skyrim and Fallout 4 writer, who's since become a Catholic priest in training, to help build out the RPG's two in-game religions.
Bethesda’s ambitious space-exploration RPG Starfield is right around the corner, and it’s now been explained why the title features an unvoiced protagonist, despite having over 200,000 lines of voiced dialogue.
Going from Skyrim to Fallout 4 and then subsequently Starfield proved a challenge for some of Bethesda’s writers.
In Polygon's recent interview with design director Emil Pagliarulo, it was revealed that Starfield very nearly had a voiced protagonist in the style of Fallout 4's sole survivor.
Starfield lead designer Emil Pagliarulo has revealed that developer Bethesda almost decided to give its protagonist a voice. Pagliarulo spoke about the game featuring a silent protagonist in an interview with Polygon leading up to the release of the sci-fi RPG.
In the five years since Bethesda Softworks first announced Starfield, much of the conversation has been focused on the endless possibilities that await players within the game’s web of planets and choices. There’s complex character and personality creation, a spectrum of geography all tricked out with the latest lighting and physics technology, customizable spaceships and space teams from highly dimensional NPCs, and loads of other bells and whistles to take advantage of the current generation of consoles.
Starfield has a New Game+ mode, ensuring you can keep playing Bethesda's enormous sci-fi RPG even after you eventually roll credits.
This is a quick public service announcement to warn you that Starfield has leaked.
Starfield lead designer and writer Emil Pagliarulo has spoken about one of the game's quests which he says he's "really psyched for players to experience". The quest was created with Eric "Ferret" Baudoin, who was also working as a senior designer on Starfield before he sadly passed away in October last year.