According to one of Bethesda Game Studios’ defining figures, players never fully understood what New Game+ was really supposed to mean in Starfield.
The latest Free Lanes update for Starfield introduced a range of small and large changes to Bethesda Game Studios’ somewhat notorious space RPG, and one of the biggest of those changes revolves around how the game’s NG+ mode functions. The main story of Starfield is built around collecting strange space artifacts scattered across the galaxy, and once they have all been gathered, the player reaches the final mission that offers entry into The Unity, a hub at the center of the multiverse. Choosing that option restarts the game in another version of the universe, where your character keeps all of their powers and abilities but loses almost everything else, while relationships between characters are reset as well. Strange things can begin to happen in these runs, although unfortunately it is partly down to luck just how strange things actually get. In a game many found a bit unambitious and slightly dull, it was one of the best concepts Starfield had, even if the execution left room for improvement.
Todd Howard, director and executive producer of Starfield, spoke to GamesRadar and cited Edge of Tomorrow as one of the inspirations. As part of the Free Lanes update, the game now also includes a container that lets players store up to 50 items. The reason for the change is that Bethesda felt too many players were rejecting the multiverse concept and skipping NG+ altogether, which meant missing one of the game’s core ideas.
“I still have the habit of saying this is a spoiler, but I don’t think it is anymore. The Unity was our way of doing New Game+. It was us asking you this weird, deep question that I actually think got lost on a lot of people. It asks whether you’re just a power gamer who wants to get everything, or whether you’re willing to leave this world behind. What do you think about the choices in your own life. Would you leave all this behind and start again. Some of that pain – giving up all your stuff, Sarah Morgan no longer loving you, and so on – is supposed to make you feel all of that.
It’s one of my favorite movies. So we create that feeling of hey, you have to leave everything behind, but as a player you’re like, I just want to go through the magic gate and get more power. If you decide to step through now, you can do that in a way where it still feels like you can continue your character and keep some of your things – after all, you earned them. Take the Trackers Alliance or other quests. You do them, and that’s it. That’s still rewarding, but somebody coming back into the game might only play for a few hours, and then the update only gave them those two or three hours. We want to do more things that update the game in a way that affects the next hundred hours. You can tell us if we’ve done our job right”, Howard said.
Creative producer Tim Lamb said that this is balanced by the addition of new upgrade paths for existing items. “Players were so attached to the gear they had collected that they didn’t want to part with it. That was too big a leap, too big a sacrifice. There are so many exciting things that can happen in the New Game+ loop that we wanted to offer a little more incentive. That’s why we’re introducing the X-Tech system, which lets you further upgrade your weapons and gear. We don’t want to ask players to put in a ton of work for a coveted reward only to turn around and say no, now it’s gone. Once those ideas started coming together, we knew we had to do something”, Lamb added.
It is hard to imagine players complaining about being allowed to keep their most valuable gear, although it is not entirely clear that this was ever the core issue with Starfield’s NG+. The bigger problem may simply be that it can take four or five full playthroughs before the genuinely strange stuff starts happening.
Source: PCGamer, GamesRadar
