Starfield Is Like Five or Six Games in One, Says Todd Howard

The 45-minute-long Starfield Direct broadcast allowed Bethesda Game Studios to deep dive into every aspect of its huge science fiction roleplaying game, clearly showing that there’s a lot to do in the upcoming title.

Speaking with IGN’s Ryan McCaffrey after the broadcast, Game Director Todd Howard commented that, in a way, it’s like Starfield has five or six games stuck in it. He also said it was a bit tricky for the studio to make sure all the various activities were seamlessly intertwined.

I try to do it all. Right now, I’m digging deep into spaceships. You could say, in some respect, Starfield is like five or six games in one, right? It’s the spaceship game, it’s the on the ground game, it’s the dialogue game, it’s the outpost game, it’s the crafting game… It does all of these things.

It is always tricky for us to get a good game flow where those things don’t feel like they are separate games. They have to weave in and out in a way that holistically creates something greater than the sum of its parts.

If you think about Elder Scrolls, it’s a fantasy world. Who would you want to be and what would you want to do? We want to provide that. And then Fallout, the same thing, in a post-apocalyptic environment: how does that factor into the things you find? Crafting is very unique in Fallout when it comes to that. What’s the vibe of the people? What are they sacrificing to stay alive? And then when it comes to Starfield and science fiction, the same sort of thing where if you were to open it up and you could do anything, how are we providing that experience? We love exploration, so when you get into a game like this, that’s why you have a thousand planets. We’d rather give you the option to do that.

In the same interview, the 53-year-old industry veteran also mused that The Elder Scrolls VI (the next game in Bethesda Game Studios’ pipeline after Starfield) might be the last entry in that franchise he produces before retirement. It could also mean that a Starfield sequel is probably around ten years out unless it is outsourced to another developer, given that Bethesda already confirmed a new Fallout game would come after TES VI.

Starfield is set to launch on September 6th for PC (check out its system requirements here) and Xbox Series S|X.