Highlights
- Starfield, the new game from Bethesda, is designed to be played for years, similar to the longevity of Skyrim.
- Bethesda games have always been known for their long-lasting popularity, and Starfield is intended to continue that trend.
- Todd Howard, the director of Starfield, emphasizes the massive scale and rich gameplay systems of the game, suggesting that it will provide players with ample content to keep them engaged for an extended period.
Todd Howard, the director of Starfield, says that the game was designed with the intention that it be played for years. Fans of Bethesda games won't be too surprised to hear that Bethesda knows its games remain popular for years after they launch. It remains a popular meme that The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is ported to every platform it can be, well over a decade past its launch. Bethesda wants Starfield to be like Skyrim, in that sense.
While it's true that Bethesda games have always been played for years after their release, it has undeniably moved further in that direction over the past 20 years. Part of that is because it takes so long for Bethesda to make games. It was just four years between The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. It was eight years between the release of Fallout 4 and Starfield. Bethesda fans have stuck with older games due in part to a lack of new ones.
The most substantive reason that Bethesda fans stick with older games, however, is because there's just so much to do. That is something that Bethesda values in its games, and something it focused on in the design of Starfield. During a recent podcast, Todd Howard said that Starfield was "intentionally" designed to be played for a long time. And by long time, he doesn't mean a 100-200 hour playthrough and then New Game Plus. He wants it to be played for years.
Howard goes on to describe how Bethesda looked at Starfield's future incrementally. He says the team asked what Starfield would look like in three months, six months, a year, or even five years. That's just the reality of making a Bethesda game. Players will be playing Starfield for years, whether Bethesda designs the game to be played that way or not. They might as well lean into it.
While Howard doesn't explicitly point to anything in Starfield as having been designed to keep players coming back year by year, it's easy to imagine what he's talking about. Starfield's scale is massive, with over 1,000 planets and more than 100 star systems. There are rich systems for building outposts and spaceships. And don't forget that official Starfield mod support is planned for 2024.
Whether Starfield continues to be played in a dozen years is yet to be proven, but wouldn't be surprising if true. Starfield has been critically well-received, but perhaps not at the same level as Skyrim. Fans likely hope that Bethesda will be able to finish The Elder Scrolls 6 in fewer than eight years, too. Still, there are plenty of planets to explore in Starfield's sky in the meantime.
Starfield is available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.