This information comes straight from the Lead Quest Designer of Starfield, Will Shen.
Starfield is Bethesda’s next big IP, promising to shake up the genre. The gameplay trailer for the title was released six months ago to a surprisingly tepid response, and many still have trepidations, considering the reaction to Bethesda’s last major release, Fallout 76.
In the most recent addition in the ‘Constellation Questions’ series, on the official Bethesda YouTube Channel, Lead Quest Designer Will Shen highlights some of the new things that we can expect in Starfield.
One of the first things mentioned concerns the faction questlines and how they will work, with Shen stating, “We also discussed early on, like ‘okay, do we make some of the factions in conflict with each other,’ and we decided we want to make sure that you can play through all the faction lines independently of each other.”
This is more akin to Skyrim than Fallout, with the factions managing to be a little more disjointed from the rest of the story. There was also a discussion regarding a return to our solar system (Called the Old Neighbourhood in-game) and to discover what happened to Earth, which Shen remarked, “Very early on, we take you to our Solar System.”
Something particularly interesting that Shen mentions is random encounters, which are a staple in modern open-world video games. Of course, in Starfield, players can explore entire planets, and as Shen stated, “We have entire planets that we have to populate.”
He went on to further state that the technology will “take whole locations” and place them on these ‘random’ planets, leading to a very dynamic system that supposedly can generate entire locations and quests on the fly. It seems an ambitious idea and one that would reward exploration and discovery, something that this game appears to be heavily focusing on.
Lastly, there was a discussion regarding companions and their impact on a player’s experience. Shen stated that companions “Have opinions” and, as such, can remark regarding your decisions. Shen also mentioned that players can have the companions “Speak for you,” a system that has been implemented in many modern RPGs; Dragon Age: Inquisition, for one, springs to mind, but Shen also says that these companion interjections are not going to direct conversations the way you want every single time.
Are you excited about Starfield? Or are you still cautiously optimistic? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.
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