Bethesda boss Todd Howard says Starfield was designed and built for longevity, even more so than RPGs like Skyrim or any of the modern Fallouts, with the studio already considering how the game will evolve for years and years to come.
In a Game Maker's Notebook interview with Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price, Howard weighs in on the discussion about the ever-escalating scale of games, which was amplified by Baldur's Gate 3 launching back-to-back with Starfield. Price asks if games really are getting too big and wonders who's driving this "need for more complexity."
"I think it starts with the developers," Howard responds. "It has to, right? I think it starts with technology. You're seeing new hardware, you're wanting to use it in new ways, you're looking at demos going 'we could do this, we could do this, we could present it in this way.' The scale of games, I think, I'd have to go back and look. How big were things before? The one thing I have noticed is, because more games are played for a long time, they're 'live,' the ability to update them over time creates games that people are playing right now that have been around for a long time, gotten years and years and years of updates, and that creates an expectation. When I'm going into something new, how does this compare with a mature game that I've been playing for a while?"
Howard describes the scale of Starfield as "irresponsible," partly owing to its setting. The team was "always trying to fill it given how much space is in space." And to the surprise of no one, just as he's done for the past several years, he also revisits Skyrim.
"Even a game like Skyrim – which if you look at it at launch was still a really, really big game – if you look at it today with add-ons and mods it's a much bigger game. It's still a game that's played 12 years later in large numbers for us. I think if you look at your audience, they get used to a game and they usually want to plus-one it. They want to add XYZ, and the developers, we usually do as well."
Howard reiterates what Bethesda's teased in previous Starfield updates: the studio's actively looking to polish and add features in response to player feedback. But even compared to Skyrim's legendarily long tail, Howard says Bethesda is in it for the long haul with Starfield, both with updates and mod support.
"This is a game and it's intentionally made to be played for a long time," he affirms. "One of the things we've learned from our previous games, from Skyrim, from Fallout, is that people want to play them for a very long time. So Starfield, I would say, was the most intentional, going into it, that this is a game people are going to play for a long time. How do we build it such that it is allowing that in a way that feels natural – and if people have played the game and finished the main quest, you can see that.
"But it's also one where, OK, what does Starfield look like in three months, what does it look like in six months, a year, two years, three years, four years, five years? We've learned that that's going to happen so let's be ready for it, make the most of it, and embrace it. That's both what we do here and with our modding community. We've learned so much there. Giving ourselves a really, really good base of a game to build upon for everybody."
In the same interview, Howard calls out encumbered Starfield hoarders for picking up everything that isn't nailed down, and reveals that Bethesda gave the dev team a "basically done" build of the game last year to play at home for testing.
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