Starfield promises to be an expansive game, allowing players to explore over a thousand planets, engage in combat, customize their spaceships, mine for minerals, discover alien life, and build bases, among many other activities. With the stars as one’s playground, the possibilities seem nearly infinite. To craft a game this ambitious takes heaps of hard work, and this is made evident when one looks at Starfield’s unusually long development history.
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Starfield Is Born
The idea for Starfield came from Todd Howard’s love of outer space and his burning interest in NASA which has remained alight since he was a child. Consequently, as the game’s lead artist Istvan Pely explained, the developers used the term “NASA-punk” to describe the game’s aesthetic, which is grounded and relatable. Several aspects of the game are inspired by current NASA technology and past missions by the space organization.
The game’s ultimate origin can be traced back to The 10th Planet, a canceled Bethesda game that the studio began development on in 1994. The space combat title was meant to be released in 1997, and though it never saw the light of day, its premise illustrates how it laid the groundwork for Starfield. It is set in the distant future, and with the solar system turned into a battlefield, a new threat comes from aliens who use a previously unknown tenth planet in the solar system as their base.
Talk of making a science fiction game never died down in Bethesda, and there were always ideas that were floated around which eventually coagulated into Starfield, which had its title trademarked in 2013. The studio has been able to craft a detailed backstory for the game that tracks what happened every decade, and to keep track of the vast Starfield lore, the studio has an internal Wiki that catalogs all the important information that developers might need to access quickly. According to Howard, the active development of the game began in 2015, and the game only moved out of pre-production in 2018, which was when it was in a playable state.
Gamers Get Their First Glimpse of Starfield
The first sighting of Starfield came in 2018 when a teaser was shown during Bethesda’s E3 presentation. It was a mere snippet, but it was effective in giving gamers a general sense of the game’s atmosphere. The first Starfield trailer came during 2021’s E3. It was not a long trailer, but it did underline the spirit of the game, which is about embarking on the unknown, feeding one’s curiosity, and answering the call to adventure.
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Other Starfield trailers have been released, including one which reveals one of the robot companions that will accompany players, if they wish, and another which announced Bethesda’s YouTube series tracking the game’s development. The most in-depth look at Starfield came in 2022 with the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase where gamers were treated to a quarter-hour-long gameplay trailer that looks at the exploration, combat, and character creation tools that players can expect from the upcoming game. Starfield will feature Bethesda’s most robust character creator to date, and while it draws from past games from the studio, it goes further by offering more detail than ever before. The trailer also confirmed that players will be able to customize spaceships and pilot them in outer space.
The game is the culmination of everything that Bethesda has learned in its decades of video game development. Howard described the game as “Skyrim in space,” and it is not hard to understand why, as the last trailer illustrated that several elements, including the lock-picking, are reminiscent of past Bethesda games. Gamers that have enjoyed the open-world freedom of discovery that past Bethesda games offer will likely find Starfield comfortably familiar, although there are also plenty of new elements, and with only snippets of the game shown, the studio may still have plenty of surprises in store.
Starfield Is Finally In Reach
Starfield was initially slated to release on November 11, 2022, which is a significant date, as The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim was released on November 11, 2011. However, it was delayed, and it is now scheduled to release in the first half of 2023. Should the game hit stores next year, it will mean the game has been in development for almost a decade and its concept has been around for even longer. With all that time available to Bethesda, Starfield could have the most elaborate lore the studio has ever produced.
The wait for Starfield has been long, but it has perhaps been longer for Howard who has dreamed of the space adventure for decades. Excitement is high for Bethesda’s project, and even God of War’s Cory Barlog has expressed his anticipation for the upcoming space game. Until its release, gamers can turn to the studio’s YouTube channel where developers post updates on the game in the Into the Starfield series.
Starfield is scheduled to release in the first half of 2023 on PC and Xbox Series X/S
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