Bethesda Game Studios (BGS) wants modders to be as involved with the game as Todd Howard promises to be long.

We started discussing Howard’s interview with IGN yesterday, but there’s still more to mention. The iconic BGS developer says, “We want this [game] to feel something unique. There’s been a lot of space sims that we’re fans of. You can see in the video that your ship has various Power Systems. There’s a little bit of FTL in terms of putting how much power into three different weapon systems and then your engines and shield. The Grav Drive lets you jump and get out of some situations that you have to put Power to.

There is some dogfighting. We keep the pace relatively slow. One of the games that I love that we sort of look at for speed is MechWarrior believe it or not, in terms of systems and power and being able to line things up. It’s a little bit faster than that, but you know what I mean, as opposed to a twitchy dogfighter. But the ship stuff is not just dogfighting. As you saw in the video, you can dock with other ships. You can disable them. You can board them. Some quests involve that. You can steal ships. There’s dialogue in space, there are space stations you can visit, there’s smuggling, there are all the things that we would want, and we’ll be showing some more of that later, but it’s a good chunk of Starfield gameplay that we think is fun when it comes to playing this type of sci-fi game.”

Starfield’s main storyline will be bigger than The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4. Howard estimates it at around 40 hours: “We usually aim for approximately that length if you look at our previous games, but this one’s ending up a little bit longer. We may tune some still and add some more quests so that it might be 20% more than our previous ones. Your mileage may vary as people generally don’t straight line it, but if our previous ones aimed for, let’s say, a 25-hour main quest, this one might be in the 30 hours, maybe 40 hours just for the main search. There are all of the other quests and faction lines and everything else.

There’s quite a bit there, and we’ve learned that people play our games for a long time. They’re still playing Skyrim, not straight for ten years, but they leave, come back, and there’s extra content. Indeed, we will be doing additional content for Starfield, and we love our modding community. We think this game for our modding community will be a dream because there’s so much they could do.” (Just don’t ruin it with Creation Club.)

Starfield will be coming to Xbox Series and PC in the first half of 2023 and will also be on (Xbox) Game Pass.

Source: WCCFTech