Starfield is one of the most anticipated games in recent years, despite it only launching on current gen Xbox consoles and PC owing to Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Developer Bethesda is renowned for making massive games in which players can sink in several hours doing quests, fighting, exploring and much more. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4 are both great examples of that.
Despite know Starfield will be a big game, we didn’t know exactly how big it was going to be in hours. Sure, it had been revealed that there will be a thousand or so planets for players to explore, and that Bethesda considers it their biggest and most ambitious game yet, but we didn’t have any sort of number. Until now, that is and it’s a mind boggling number.
What did a Bethesda exec have to stay about Starfield’s runtime?
Bethesda’s Head of Publishing, Pete Hines, recently sat down at Gamescom 2023 to talk about Starfield, specifically his own playthrough of the game and the number of hours it’s taken him to reach where he has. Here’s what he had to say:
“80 hours in, I went from doing one game to a completely different game where I started really focusing on the main quest and then I got so caught up in the main quest, that I spent the next 50 hours just doing that. […] I’m here to tell you that this game doesn’t really even get going until you finish the main quest. Telling somebody, ‘Oh, I played Starfield for 40 hours’ tells you nothing about what that person has done”.
However, game director Todd Howard had estimated that it would take a little less than the figure Hines quoted, estimating that it would take players somewhere between 30 – 40 hours. Elsewhere at Gamescom, Hines also said:
“If I’m being honest, there’s really not an amount of time that I’m comfortable enough [with saying] ‘Now you’ve played enough Starfield to get what this game is.’ Because, like, I’m at 150, 160 hours on my current playthrough, and […] I haven’t even come close”.
What’s clear from Hines’s newly revealed information is that players will have to devote a lot of time to really understand Starfield and see what the game has to offer.
Why was Starfield delayed from its original release date?
Starfield was announced at E3 of 2021 and it was said to be launching on November 11th of 2022. However, as we now know, that deadline wasn’t met because of a major delay and the game being postponed to September 6th 2023, which is the current release date and just around the corner. Those extra ten months were, according to Todd Howard, necessary to work towards eradicating the bugs and glitches that Bethesda is infamous for.
He said that the extra time was spent well, in terms of replaying the game multiple times to remove flaws, ensuring balanced gameplay, fine tuning interface, working on systems and of course making the game as much fun for players as possible.
This extra time to make sure the Starfield is as good as it can be is good news for players, especially since they’re likely to spend so much time playing the game.
Source: Kotaku
