Starfield's design director has said Bethesda regained the trust of players after fixing Fallout 76 following its rough launch.
29.08.2023 - 18:01 / techradar.com / Emil Pagliarulo / Pete Hines
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.
Starfield’s character creation will not only allow players to customize their in-game appearance, but it will also give the option to select a background and traits, so it’s unlikely that any two protagonists will be exactly the same.
In a new interview with Polygon, lead designer Emil Pagliarulo revealed that the player character was originally supposed to be voiced — in fact, the studio hired a voice actor for the role — but they determined that having a set number of voices for the protagonist would limit players’ creative freedom to play as the character they want to be.
“Early on in the game, we did have a voiced protagonist. In pre-production, the plan was to have a voiced protagonist,” Pagliarulo said. “We hired an actor, we got the voice, we listened to him and we were like: ‘You know what, this guy is too specific.’ So then what are the options? Do we have, like some RPGs do, four voices? Do we have one voice, but hire someone else who’s more convenient? But [in Starfield] you can make every different type of person. We realized that the only way to really do it and let the player be the person they want to be was to have an unvoiced protagonist.
“There was a time in the industry where every protagonist was voiced,” he continued. “It was a AAA thing. We started realizing, ‘You know what, maybe that’s not the case, maybe fans will actually enjoy the game even more.’”
Ultimately, this decision ended up being “really freeing” for Bethesda — Pagliarulo added: “It was not having a voiced protagonist that allowed us to create such a big world.” It certainly is a big world, too — Bethesda’s Pete Hines recently teased that he's still not done with the game after 160 hours. Needless to say, players are going to be very busy, very soon.
If you still need to pre-order Starfield, you can find out everything you need to know (including about the different special editions) in our Starfield pre-order guide. You can also check out more upcoming gamesin our roundup of new Xbox Series X games.
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.
Bethesda's head of publishing, Pete Hines, has said that game bugs are inevitable and they ultimately allow the studio to lean into player freedom.
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Never has a Bethesda game been released without at least a few bugs. We all know how it goes… we either cease to play Skyrim because our AI companions won’t stop running into traps, or we embrace the wonderful weirdness and turn it into streaming content. And it’s not just us players who feel the need to cut Bethesda games some slack for their shortcomings.
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We’re closing in on the final days until Starfield finally arrives. By now, you’ve probably read everything about the game (maybe even filled in your own unofficial character planner). However, did you know that the game was originally going to have a voiced protagonist?
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.
Bethesda Game Studios once considered giving the playable character in Starfield a voice. In fact, they got so far as to hire a voice actor. But ultimately, they decided not to go ahead with the idea.