Starfield is coming, and it’s coming quick. Ever since it was announced fans have been pouring over every word from Creative Director Todd Howard, desperate to find every little detail, and any little nugget of information to gleam something new. In an interview over with the folks at IGN, Todd Howard was talking about a variety of Starfield centric topics, from the amount of systems in-game, to the length the basic story will take!
Todd Howard Talks Starfield
When first announced, it was the breadth of the promises that surprised fans, with Starfield supposedly boasting over 1,000 planets distributed between 100 systems, all fully explorable and unique. Then we found out that of these 1,000 planets, 10% of them would have life, supposedly to imitate our own ‘Goldilocks’ zone, but also presumably to keep a realistic expectation as to what next-gen systems could actually support, as well as how much content they could come up with.
Now, we’ve find out a little more regarding Starfield, this time the length of its basic story. For comparison, Fallout 4 averaged out at around 27 hours to beat the story, whereas Skyrim hit the lofty heights of 40. Starfield is coming in around about the same, with Todd Howard saying it’ll take thirty to forty hours currently, but that may still change and be tweaked.
If you’re wondering how a game with so many planets, systems and locations can be so short, don’t worry, that’s only the story! According to HowLongtoBeat the average completionist run on Skyrim takes over 150 hours, and again, so assuming there’s the same if not more content in Starfield, we’ll be playing it for a long time to come! Chances are, thanks to next-gen hardware and the long development time this could end up being a conservative estimate, so buy plenty of supplies, because come launch week you may not be moving far.
Between exploring the planets, the comprehensive ship-building and base-building system, no doubt thousands of collectibles and hopefully some sort of alien-life-Pokedex-like feature, there will be no shortage of content for us to feast on, but for those hoping for a two hundred epic story, similar to the proposed cinematic length of Baldur’s Gate 3? Unfortunately you’re out of luck. At least for now.
Todd Howard, Starfield and the FTC
For many reasons Todd Howard and Starfield have been the talk of many lately. Whether it’s the imminent release of the game (only two months at this point!), or how heavily featured the Xbox exclusive was during the FTC trial, every man and his dog will know about it by now. No such thing as bad publicity though!
If somehow you weren’t aware, the FTC trial has just concluded, but its purpose was to deem whether the proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft would be considered anti-competitive or unfair to others in the gaming market, primarily PlayStation and Sony. Throughout the trial there has been mudslinging from all directions and some surprising revelations, the biggest being that without Bethesda’s purchase by Microsoft a few years ago, Starfield was poised to be a PlayStation exclusive! It would be weird to see Starfield with a PlayStation logo, but at least then maybe we’d have the game with more than 30FPS!
Either way though, we can all agree that whether it’s on PlayStation or Xbox, Starfield is shaping up to be one of the biggest RPGs of the year, and quite potentially the biggest ever. What do you make of all this? Will you be buying Starfield, or has this next put you off? Let us know in the comments!
Starfield is due to be released September 6th (September 1st for those with early access!), and will of course only be available on Xbox Series X/S and PC.
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