In the latest episode of their Into the Starfield series, Starfield’s development team revealed more info about the upcoming game. According to the lead artist Istvan Pely, Bethesda is focused on a certain “level of immersion” and that they want players to feel like “you’re not just playing a game but you’re living in this world, in this universe.” Later on, Bethesda inserts brief gameplay footage featuring the chunky bipedal robot shown in the game’s June 2021 trailer. This guy’s name is Vasco, and he’ll be one of the player companions that will be available in Starfield.
In addition, Bethesda also talked more about the importance of dialogue in Starfield as well as its “persuasion system.” Lead quest designer Will Shen describes it as an “evolution” of the same system used in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, explaining that the studio “didn’t want it to be a system where there was definitely the right thing to say”. Game director Todd Howard even goes as far as to describe Starfield’s dialogue system as “one of the most successful ones” that the studio has had. Bethesda officially revealed Starfield last year after years of rumors following the studio’s decision to trademark the name in 2013. Having been in development since late 2015, Starfield will serve as Bethesda’s first new title under the Microsoft banner following the finalization of the late 2020 acquisition last year. Unfortunately, unlike Bethesda’s previous outings, Starfield will be an Xbox exclusive, a fact that Howard apologized for last June. So far, Bethesda has done an excellent job keeping a tight lid on important information regarding Starfield. Of the little that we do know, Starfield will see players join Constellation, a space-faring organization dedicated to expanding humanity’s reach beyond the stars. As NASA-inspired scientists, players can join different factions from various galaxies, including a gang of space pirates that is slowly growing in infamy and influence, the Crimson Fleet. Naturally, as a “universal” open-world title, Starfield is poised to be Bethesda’s biggest game yet, with the in-game script alone having over 150,000 lines of dialogue. Bethesda didn’t confirm when it will show off more of Starfield, but it shouldn’t be too long now. As Starfield is scheduled to hit store shelves in November, Bethesda should start dropping more trailers for the game by June. Most likely, Starfield will be the highlight of Microsoft’s showcase at E3 2022 and other gameplay showcases that are happening around the same time.
