Bethesda’s upcoming space RPG Starfield is still quite a ways off in every sense, but director Todd Howard has dropped some tiny nuggets of information that seems to indicate the game will be a big one, offering the developer’s biggest RPG map to date.
Todd Howard loves to tease Bethesda fans. And with his newest statements, it looks like their next game could make fans very happy. The new sci-fi RPG they’re working on could have the biggest RPG map to date of any Bethesda game. Starfield could be the biggest game the company has ever made, according to statements from Howard. In a recent interview, Bethesda’s upcoming space RPG Starfield got some more details.
The Starfield Reddit community summarized things for us, so that makes this easy. Howard made the statements during the Develop: Brighton Digital conference this week, talking about a variety of topics. There was talk of procedural generation and the new tools that Bethesda is using to aid in making that tech work in larger games. And apparently, the lessons learned will be applied to both The Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield
According to Todd Howard, Starfield’s map will be bigger than even Fallout 76‘s, which itself was already four times the size of Skyrim. This will all be aided by various procedural tools that will populate and generate the world. The studio is still using the Creation Engine though, so ti will all need to be retooled to support the ambitious new game.
That overhaul will include a complete revamp of animations, texture loading and so much more. In essence, we’re seeing a whole new engine in terms of quality and performance. The AI and scripting is also being overhauled to aid in immersion and more for the sake of enjoyment. Players will be really happy with the result, or at least that’s what Bethesda hopes. “When people see the results, hopefully they’d be as happy as we are,” said Howard.
Howard also confirmed that Starfield will be on Xbox Game Pass from Day 1, as well as The Elder Scrolls VI. Both games were rolled into the massive $7.5 billion purchase of ZeniMax by Microsoft, so this was a foregone conclusion.
No details yet on a release date yet obviously, as the game is still very much in production. Todd did say that “It’s going to be a while” before we see more of either of these games, so strap in and wait.
