Todd Howard reveals Starfield was designed to be played for “years”

Todd Howard of Bethesda claims Starfield was designed and built to last so that it can be played for years.

Bethesda’s latest game, Starfield, is massive and has a huge explorable game world consisting of over 1,000 planets to explore. It also offers countless quests to finish, several NPCs to meet, multiple ships to acquire and customize, and more. As such, it’s similar to most Bethesda RPGs launched in the past, like the Fallout or Elder Scrolls titles.

On September 25, in a Game Makers Notebook interview with Insomniac CEO Ted Price, Todd Howard revealed that Starfield’s massive scale was intentional. When discussing the growing trend of scale in games, Howard remarked that the lifecycle of prior Bethesda games made them think about Starfield in the long term.

Price asked if games are really getting too big and wondered who’s driving this “need for more complexity.” Howard responded, “I think it starts with the developers. 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,” he continues, saying, “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 then explained how Skyrim’s longevity influenced the development of Starfield. “One of the things we’ve learned from our previous games is that people want to play them for a very long time,” he said before delving into the questions that fueled his team’s efforts.

“People are going to ask, 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,” he said.

Bethesda fans are probably not surprised by the idea of a five-year shelf-life. This has been the norm with both Skyrim and Fallout 4. Hopefully, for Starfield, this means that the game will be getting more content in the future and not re-releases.

If you want to read more about Starfield, check out 10 things the game doesn’t tell you, or how a player found an Anakin Skywalker Star Wars Easter egg.