Bethesda Game Studio’s creative director, Todd Howard, wasn’t expecting our Starfield ships to be so damn cool.
12.09.2023 - 16:29 / pcgamer.com / Todd Howard / Phil Spencer / Howard
You may have heard about a little space game called Starfield, the gravitational pull from which risks swallowing all games discourse for months and possibly years to come. Perhaps that's no surprise for a game that's been in development and hyped for as long as any title that I can remember (well, ones that have shipped anyway) but it's easy to forget now the thing's in our hands that it was subject to multiple delays along the way.
The majority of the audience now seems to understand that delays are a necessary evil for large and complex projects. But they're still a bummer. Bethesda director and executive producer Todd Howard has been on the interview circuit promoting the game, as part of which he and Xbox head Phil Spencer sat down with the Washington Post, and during that chat Howard put the delays down to a mix of production and pandemic issues.
The Post reporter first of all noted they'd landed on Earth while playing the game, and half-expected to find the DC of Fallout 3 (in Starfield, Earth has suffered an extinction event).
«We talked about it,» laughs Howard, «Oh, we planned, and those plans went out the window. We knew we were going to rewrite parts of the engine, so we started building technology for the planets and the outer space stuff on our previous engine and renderer.»
This culminated in Bethesda realising they'd done years of work that needed porting to a newer version of its in-house engine: Bethesda's previous games are made using the Creation Engine, while Starfield is the first to use Creation Engine 2. At around the same time the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and like everyone else the studio had to quickly adapt to remote working.
The game was at one point scheduled for a 2022 release but this changed things, with Howard saying working from home made the process «very, very slow.» When choosing the original November 2022 release date «we had lots of buffer and we felt really good about it,» said Howard, "[but] as things moved on, we were off by a percentage, and a percentage when it comes to the scale of this game turns out to be a lot of time. We felt [the delay] was the right thing to do to give us the time we required."
Elsewhere in the interview Howard talks about making a space game in the wider context of gaming history: Many consider 1962's Spacewar! to be the first videogame, while you don't have to go too far in our industry to find someone who will tell you the original Elite is still the best game ever. Starfield now sits in that lineage, one of those games rooted in Terra Firma that reaches up and grasps for the stars.
«It's something we always talked about here,» said Howard. «A few years in, we figured out why people try and stop or don’t want to do it all the way.
Bethesda Game Studio’s creative director, Todd Howard, wasn’t expecting our Starfield ships to be so damn cool.
The first full trailer for Kingsman creator Matthew Vaughn's new action comedy Argylle is finally here – and, well, we're still none the wiser as to what it's really about. What we do know, though, is that the teaser, which you can watch above, sees Bryce Dallas Howard's timid spy novelist Elly Conway having a pretty... cat-astophic day.
Apple has been reported on multiple occasions to officially unveil the M3 later this year, and it will be the company’s second 3nm chipset after the A17 Pro. Unfortunately, the company’s demand for its next-generation SoCs will be below expectations as shipments of its MacBook and iPad lineup continue to fall, with an analyst reporting that the Work-From-Home (WFH) trend has run its course.
I've walked on nearly 200 different planets in Starfield in environments ranging from frozen tundra to baking infernos to toxic atmospheres. And in all that time I've only suffered one affliction that I felt a need to rush to a doctor to fix: I contracted a lung condition that eventually got so bad it made sprinting consume my oxygen supply in a matter of seconds, and I didn't have the meds to cure it myself.
If you are bummed that planet exploration in Starfield is not as challenging as expected, Bethesda originally planned to make the system much more punitive, according to the game's director.
Starfield's planets were originally supposed to be much more punishing for players, that is until Bethesda "nerfed the hell out of it," reveals Todd Howard.
It looks like The Elder Scrolls 6 won't be releasing until 2026 at the very earliest, and our PlayStation pals are likely going to be missing out entirely.
Do you think Starfield takes place in the same Earth as Fallout? Do you think it should have been officially so? As it turns out, this was a key decision in Starfield’s development.
Earth is an inhospitable wasteland in Starfield. Sounds familiar, aye? Nuclear war ravaged our little floating rock in the Fallout series, leaving much of the planet a smoking radioactive desert. However, the two games aren't connected, but Bethesda did consider setting Starfield in the Fallout universe at one point during development.
For reasons I won't get into here because it may constitute a little bit of a spoiler, the planet Earth in Starfield is a bit of a wasteland. But what if it was The Wasteland—that is, the post-nuclear hellscape of Bethesda's other big sci-fi-ish game series, Fallout? In an interview with The Washington Post, creative director Todd Howard said developers actually gave thought to the idea.
Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield is available now for Xbox Series X/S and PC, amassing over six million players and topping physical sales charts in the United Kingdom. It was also in development for eight years, and despite that, as usually happens in the industry, some plans didn’t make it in.
Starfield director Todd Howard has spoken about plans for the game that didn’t make the final cut, including the idea for a very neat Fallout reference.